Artist Biography: Masumi Hayashi
Masumi Hayashi is an artist whose photographs and installations have
gained attention in the United States, Europe and Japan. Her work has been exhibited and represented
in many respected museums and galleries, including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art,
London, England. Ms. Hayashi is a Professor in the Art Department at Cleveland State University .
Professor Hayashi has awarded the 1994 Cleveland Visual Arts Award. She
has received from the Ohio Arts Council artist fellowships and a project grant, the national
Edowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest fellowship, a Florida Arts Council fellowship grant, and faculty
research grants from Cleveland State University, and a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund
research grant.
Her photographs have been published in magazines such as
DoubleTake (fall 1997), Aperture (Beyond Wilderness), See (issue 1:1), and
Mother Jones (April 1995).
The series "American Concentration Camps" brings focus to the
American internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, from 1942 to 1945. This
chapter of American history is examined in a series of Hayashi's panoramic photo collages of the
camp sites and has expanded to include some of the sites of the Japanese Canadian internment. She
has collected interviews from camp internees and these voices have add a collective memory to these
desolate landscape photographs.
This is a personal body of work for the artist, since she was born in the
Gila River Relocation camp in Arizona in 1945. Other series of work using her panoramic photo
collages include the "post industrial sites" in the Midwest,(1986-1991), "E.P.A
.Superfund Sites" (1989-1993), abandoned "prisons series" (1987-1996), and
"CityWorks" (1987-1994). We will continue to update this website with other of Ms.
Hayashi's projects with a more representative retrospective. At present, some of Masumi Hayshi's Prison Series is
spotlighted in the on-line magazine, XConnect (May 1997
issue)published by the University of Phillidelphia, and the Cleveland State University Art
Department faculty website.
