Jerry Takigawa
Artist Statement
Jerry Takigawa’s Balancing Cultures presents a multi award-winning photography series about the artist’s family’s experience with the WWII American concentration camps. This project offered an opportunity to confront the racism perpetrated on the Japanese sanctioned by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, issued on February 19, 1942. That event resulted in the incarceration of over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two thirds of them American citizens. Awakened by a discovery of old family photographs taken in an Arkansas concentration camp, Takigawa was compelled to speak out with compassion and in contrast to his parent’s silence. He created a visual journey through collaged photographs using artifacts, documents, and memories, resulting in a distinctive telling of one family’s journey from immigration to incarceration, and re-assimilation. Today, we see renewed violence against Asian Americans and Balancing Cultures is a reminder that racism, hysteria, and economic exploitation are ubiquitous forces underpinning the social, political, and environmental landscape we face today.
Jerry Takigawa was the winner of the First Annual Foto Forum Santa Fe Photography Award in 2021
Balancing Cultures
Limited Edition Prints Available
Foto Forum Santa Fe Exhibition Record
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Balancing Cultures, solo exhibition, First Annual Foto Forum Santa Fe Photography Award Winner, 2021
Biography
Jerry Takigawa’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces. He has been the recipient of a variety of photographic honors and awards including the Imogen Cunningham Award; nominated for the Santa Fe Prize; twice nominated for the Prix Pictet; Critical Mass Top 50; the Clarence John Laughlin Award; Lens Culture, Fine Art Photography Awards Finalist; NY Center for Photographic Art, Humans, First Place; CENTER Awards, Curator’s Choice, First Place; the Rhonda Wilson Award; and Foto Forum Santa Fe’s Annual Photo Award. Takigawa studied photography with Don Worth at San Francisco State University and received a BFA with an emphasis in painting. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, and the Library of Congress. His monograph, Balancing Cultures, was published by Dayo Press in 2021. Takigawa was born in Chicago, Illinois. He lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.
