2006–2007
511
west 25 th street, new york, ny www.cueartfoundation.org
10001
h a r u ko ta n a k a
haru ko tana k a
CUE Art Foundation
February 2 – March 10, 2007
Curated by Cindy Bernard
We are honored and grateful to present this exhibition generously curated by Cindy Bernard. For the CUE solo exhibition series, Ms. Bernard has chosen fellow artist, Haruko Tanaka, who lives and works in Los Angeles. Ms. Bernard’s appreciation of Tanaka’s work, demonstrates how the Foundation’s discretionary selection process allows for the unfettered expression of each curator’s views. CUE is please to recognize that this is Ms. Tanaka’s first solo exhibition in New York. Ms. Bernard and we, together, celebrate this effort and wish her a future of fulfillment and success.
LEAD SPONSOR OF 2006-07 SEASON OF EXHIBITION CATALOGUES: KYESUNG PAPER GROUP (SOUTH KOREA) ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY ELIZABETH FIRESTONE GRAHAM FOUNDATION
In Conversation
Cindy Bernard & Haruko Tanaka
October 2006, Los Angeles, CA
Cindy Bernard: I vaguely recall that when we met, back in 1996 when you were a student at USC, you were studying translation or languages? Haruko Tanaka: Well I went there as an International Relations major when I was 18. Being from an international school in Japan, I figured that was the thing to do. But during some introductory courses I realized that International Relations just meant American foreign policy, so I got really turned-off. The most disturbing thing was that we’d be in class and the teacher would ask, “Well what happened to us,” or “What did we do,” — there were all these ‘we’s’ and ‘us’s’ that I couldn’t relate to. Fit In Room Series, Summer 2000, #6 2000 C-print 11" x 11"
CB: You mean ‘us’ as in the U.S.? HT: He’d say, “Well what happened to us in 1941?” CB: And as a Japanese student sitting there…. HT: I felt really uncomfortable. I just hadn’t grown up with a “we-us-ours-them” vernacular or paradigm. So then I went to the Communications Department and then finally found Art in my third year there. CB: So what was your idea of what International Relations was supposed to be? HT: As far as my previous education was concerned, there was a strong emphasis on World History and World Literature. So my sense was that I would get to University of Southern California (USC) and study the foreign policy of many different countries. CB: Or foreign policy from many perspectives, in any case. HT: But it wasn’t, so ….
CB: So do you think that experience had an effect on your work? Because pretty much from the beginning, as I recall anyway, your work always dealt with issues of identity—Japanese, Japanese-American, Asian, Asian-American. Even from your first projects… HT: Definitely. The question was always, ‘Who am I and how do I fit in?’ But growing up in both England and Japan, and being at USC and living in the U.S. for the first time, I realized those things were really complex. At the same time I was fitting in pretty smoothly, people were missing whole parts of me. I had an American accent so the assumption was that I was Japanese-American. And since I seemed to have a certain amount of scattered knowledge of popular culture references I sort of slipped in. But inside it was a tremendous shock and even more of a shock to be confronted with wondering whether my apprehension to voice my opinion out loud, all the time, was because of my inner repressed Japanese-ness. People wanted to know immediately whether I was a Republican or a Democrat. People wanted to know what I was thinking all the time. So all of a sudden I was apparently a lot more Japanese than I had ever been. And yet in Japan I had always seen myself as somewhat of a foreigner because I had grown up abroad and English was my first language. CB: Is California Telephone (2003) the first work that you’re not in? HT: I’m in there for a split second at the very beginning whispering the first phrase. The first work though that I wasn’t in was By the Waterfall in Eaton Canyon — 7 times (2000) which was my second video ever. It was a video of a group of 7 high school students hiking having their group portrait snapshot taken by a passing hiker, looped 7 times. But after
that there were several photo projects, The Fit In Room Series, Summer 2000, All In Me (2001) and my first film I Love You (2002) which had my face all over them. California Telephone came right after I Love You which was all about…
passes through one person to another. It’s literally that difference between each person that causes that degeneration of the phrases. The quotes in California Telephone are from June Jordan – can you talk about her influence on your work?
CB: All about you!
HT: June Jordan was a poet, essayist, novelist, activist and pacifist. She was also a professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley where she founded and directed Poetry for the People which was a program aimed toward achieving political and artistic empowerment for students. A friend of mine from CalArts, Maryam Kashani, had gone to UC Berkeley in undergrad and knew June Jordan from then. Well I was hanging out with Maryam one night and she asked me if I knew about June Jordan’s writing and more specifically if I had ever read her collection of love poems, Haruko/Love Poems. I immediately picked up a copy of the book and was just so jazzed to see my name in print, not only on a bookcover, but all over inside the book too. Who knew!! It was just amazing to read titles like “For HARUKO,” “Poem for HARUKO,” “Update for HARUKO,” “Messages from HARUKO,” “Postcript with HARUKO”….
HT: Yep, it’s all about me and my big face being in the 16mm frame and being projected onto a giant screen. So I just wanted to go to the extreme opposite which I felt meant literally turning the camera in the other direction, while still committing to voicing my issues with representation. So the logical answer seemed to be a group portrait. The great thing with the panning camera shot was that I was able to capture a group portrait but also focus on the individual at the same time. CB: Well you went from representing yourself in a way you hadn’t seen in American movies, or as I think you once said I Love You was generated out of the desire to see someone with a Japanese face have the words “I love you” uttered on screen to them. Then, in California Telephone, you are replaced with a range of Asian faces. So it becomes an encyclopedia of what’s not represented. HT: It’s connected to I Love You in that I was thinking about taking matters into my own hands and doing something about the very thing I was always complaining about—the severe lack of Asian, Asian-American, and chubby girl representation, in the case of I Love You, in American visual culture. So what could I do?—put as many Asian faces up there as if it were the most normal thing in the world. So you don’t have to talk about it all, or you do have to talk about it. It can actually go either way. And it’s not only Asian faces but it’s also different accents—English as a first language, English as a second language, English as a third language, native English speaker with an accent, etc. The nuances are endless. CB: And that whole process of comprehension is reiterated through the loss of the sentence as it
CB: Because in English you wouldn’t have seen it so often. HT: Yes! When you go to any gift stores for tourists where they have the little California license plates with the names on them— “HARUKO” is never going to be there you know…and that always got me down because I’d always look in the H’s anyway. CB: Right, they’re probably not going to sell like “JANE” or “CINDY” in the United States. HT: Exactly. And once I read the poetry I was completely blown away. She was devastatingly emotional and yet also political. Love and politics went hand in hand. So the lines from California Telephone are excerpted from I Must Become a Menace to my Enemies-Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976.
In Conversation: Cindy Bernard & Haruko Tanaka
CB: So the first evening that you organized was TAKE BACK THE LOVE: A June Jordan Celebration in 2003? HT: Yes. An evening of films, poetry readings, visual art, graffiti, emcee, dj, and improvised live music, all in celebration of June Jordan. A couple of friends and I got together. We had all happened to make works of art about or around June Jordan at that time so we thought it would be completely timely to have a celebration, and it was also the anniversary of her passing and so we did a one night event at this alternative space called Six Months on Crenshaw run by Eungie Joo. It was the best thing because it incorporated our passion and love of politics, spirituality, art making and bootie shaking! It was a wonderful experience because it proved to us that we could express ourselves in all the different, real and joyous ways that we were, just the way we were. I had a blast. Then that same summer, it was the night of Barry White’s death, I’ll never forget, July 5th, 2003, my friend and also June Jordan event collaborator Seema Kapur and I did How to be an artist and activist at the same time. As part of this larger show called Down To It at Crazyspace, we had a sign-in desk/booth where people could pick up their very own activist/artist doggie bags. It seemed like the question was on a lot of people’s minds. At discussions and critiques at Six Months, artists were struggling with the issue of how can I be an artist and activist at the same time? And our sentiment was, well how can you not be? I think our definition of “activism” was different. What Seema and I concluded was that what we do is inevitably rooted both in art and activism (just to name a few). CB: Arundahti Roy talks about this. She hates the term writer-activist, for her it’s like saying sofa-bed. She claims it suggests that writers, and by extension artists, are “too effete” for the clarity and the passion necessary to publicly take a stand and that activists lack intellectual complexity in their position taking. That in limiting the activities or actions that either term can encompass, it diminishes both.
HT: It seemed like when these questions were being asked peoples’ art and activism were suffering respectively because the question had a paralyzing effect where artists would torture themselves because their work wasn’t politically effective or motivated enough. But I think by virtue of who we are—women of color in the U.S., multi-lingual, multicultural, just to name a few—then what we express is art, it is political, it is activist. So we had a Barry White altar playing Barry White music—just to keep things grounded.
One of the 350 plots at South Central Farm, the largest urban garden in the U.S. December 2005
CB: Just so we wouldn’t forget what was important. HT: Exactly. And then we had this table where people could sign-in and take their own Artist/Activist doggie bag home with them. There was a CD inside with a reading of June Jordan’s Why I became a pacifist and then How I became a warrior again: from the June Jordan celebration, we also had a US Postal service sticker, inspired by taggers, on which we had printed a picture of a woman revolutionary on it saying “I RESIST ________ ” and we encouraged people to fill in the blank, post it up somewhere in public and then email us a photo of it. Only a couple of people ended up getting back to us, but that’s okay. I think what we wanted to say was—Don’t worry about it. Just keep making the work as close as to who you are as possible.
Manifesto workshop participants at South Central Farm, April 2006
as that sort of immediacy, until “La Gran Marcha” and the “Day without an Immigrant March” earlier this year.
CB: Activism is a big part of your work. How do you decide which activities are incorporated into artworks? I’m thinking of your whole involvement with the battle to save the South Central Farm here in Los Angeles. 1 Sometimes there is a direct correlation as with the M-Y-MANIFESTO WORKSHOP at South Central Farm, but in other works the politic is less overt even if an activist position still informs the work.
CB: For you, is the power of the march related to the diversity of representation within the voice that’s being shouted?
HT: Well leading up to that point I had started going to anti-war protest rallies and the thing that I found out was that even though I was chanting in front of the Fed Building or down Hollywood Boulevard for things I believed in, I actually didn’t resonate with that sort of energy. I felt like I was being shouted at or scolded. CB: Can you talk about that. What do you mean?
“Un día sin immigrante/Day without an immigrant” March, Downtown, Los Angeles, May 1, 2006
CB: When you do these events, what makes them successful for you? HT: I think what makes them successful is the process. I have collaborated with various people so far—and by collaborating I mean co-authoring. I think the great thing about collaboration is the compromise and the unsuspecting results. You have to make compromises with the people that you’re working with. Sometimes a collaborator might insist on something that seems so outlandish, but then you see just how obsessed or dedicated they are about it that you just trust that it’s going to work. And everybody has a little bit of that blinded insistence that they contribute, so the end result is something that you could have never expected to have done by yourself.
Each time we’ve given 120% as far as what we want to do and how we want to do it; but as far as who gets there and whether or not there will be any press coverage, which there has not been at all, we don’t sweat that part. Our attitude has been maximum expectation of ourselves, but no expectations on the people that come. But we’re grateful because people have given us their time and shown up.
1 At 14 acres, South Central Farm was the largest urban garden in the United States. Feeding over 300 families for over a decade, the farmers were evicted after the land was sold to a private developer. The farmers are disputing the validity of the sale and continue to have vigils in protest.
HT: I realized that in going to all these rallies around town (and I think a lot of people felt the same way) was that it was really anticlimactic. I think that I had this romanticism about being a part of mass protests and rallies. Being in the marches though somehow didn’t feel like the way the photographs looked from the 60’s. I’d look at the photos from Life magazine from that time and I’d get chills and a little tearyeyed. But obviously I didn’t really know what was going on, what the timing was…so I’d go to these rallies thinking that there would be some kind of overwhelming feeling or understanding. And I realized that that wasn’t going to happen and that it was just like anything else—I would have to practice at it. It’s like a muscle that has to be trained. I think a lot of people were expecting to get there and be hit by this bolt of lightning of activism and revolution. I know I did. I just wanted it to click. But I didn’t feel it, as far
CB: Those marches were considerably larger than any of the other marches that had been happening… HT: Oh it was huge. Millions of people. It was so packed.
HT: For sure. In that march, it really felt like peoples’ lives were at stake. People that didn’t usually consider themselves to have a so-called ‘political’ bone in their body were on the streets demanding for a better life. Also several months earlier I had started going to anti-death penalty vigils. It was right around the time that California had lined up three executions in a row—Stanley “Tookie” Williams, Clarence Ray Allen, and Michael Morales. The outcry for Stanley Tookie Williams was huge and I ended up going to this candlelight vigil in Westwood and it was a silent march to a neighborhood church following a protest at the Fed Building. It was really spiritual and therefore comfortable for me. I resonated with the silent procession. It dawned upon me that political activism was something that I would have to put in the time to search out and connect with and in that search I could custom make what activism consisted of for me. Needless to say the Tookie vigil was amazing. The church was packed and there was a tangible air of community, righteous rage, and the desire for change. And then the next month, one night I just sort of remembered, “Oh it’s the other guy. Oh I guess I’d better go.” CB: The other less famous guy. HT: Yeah, and I went straight to the church and was shocked to see only 10 people there. It was the core group of ten people who have met every month, regardless of media coverage and celebrity highlighting. I realized then that political activism is
In Conversation: Cindy Bernard & Haruko Tanaka
Research material: page from Japanese cookbook
unglamorous, un-climactic and painfully slow. Things take a really long time and it takes a lot of tedious work. Whatever the movement or cause, it doesn’t happen over night and for the most part, it certainly does not happen in front of a television news or documentary film camera. Speaking of documentary films, I think that this genre of filmmaking has been indispensable in fostering a more informed American public. Not everyone is going to pick up the book An Inconvenient Truth but they are much more likely to go see the movie and get educated, informed and even entertained in two hours. I think though that our fluency and comfort in becoming politically informed through documentary films has also given us a false sense of time and an unrealistic, hyper-intellectualized perception of how political movements run. Take for example the South Central farmers and their movement to save the farm. Along with tremendous global and local support, there was also a lot of criticism around how the South Central farmers should have acted at certain stages of the movement—which by the way, still continues with vigils every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday night next to the farm. But to those that quickly attributed the loss of the farm to poor strategy, not enough diplomacy or savvy public relations tactics that should have taken advantage of the seemingly endless pool of Hollywood celebrity and money, I would ask—What does the ideal movement look like? What is the perfect political movement? There’s no such thing. Everyone is learning along the way. Especially when it is a grass roots effort. But, I think, when there is a lack of understanding of just how much nitty gritty trench work that goes into a movement, all the work and hours that don’t make it into the neatly packaged documentary, then there is a disconnect; compassion and empathy take a back seat, and everyone becomes a critic. CB: Let’s digress slightly and talk about the (SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE photographs that you’re working on for the CUE show... HT: What I wanted to highlight in the (SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE photographs was how we all
inherit culture and we give culture to other people on an every day, everyday people way. I think that sometimes we are a lot more diverse within than we realize. So the photographs came from the question—what have I inherited from the people around me and what do I now make my own? And how wonderful is it that I can learn a seamstress fold from an African American woman from Oakland, and now it becomes a part of me and I get to pass that on. CB: And the form of the photographs, they are taken from Japanese cookbooks? Can you talk about the relationship between the Japanese cookbook diagrams and the folding pieces. HT: I was also interested in representation of culture and how things are read. In this case the instructions read from right to left, top to bottom, as they would in a Japanese cookbook. The form is also inspired by Japanese origami diagrams. What has always amazed me about Japanese cookbooks was the generosity of the layouts—everything is always in color and there are tons of photographs showing what to do each step of the way. My experience of British or American cookbooks has been a little different—mostly text and very few pictures. CB: Yes I sense a cookbook review coming! HT: I know! Those cookbooks work fine, but Japanese cookbooks always have color photographs with each step in it which I thought was so user friendly. But at the same time there are also these origami instructions that were amazingly hard to follow, but they assumed that you could. I always thought that whoever was putting together these instructions believed in the best wihtin us. They had a certain respect for the audience and believed that people were smart and patient enough to get this. They trust that we’ll figure it out. CB: That you’ll figure out how the swan got from step a to step b to step c even though there’s no hand in there actually showing you the fold. interview Continues on page 17
California Telephone 2003, 16mm, b&w, sync sound 3 minutes
Film and video stills from left to right
I Love You 2002, 16mm, color, sync sound 2 minutes
Ue wo muite Arukou / Sรณ Danรงo Samba 2002, A collaboration with Bia Gayotto DV, color, sound, 4 minutes
AROUND Special Registration 2003 DV, color, sound, 18 minutes
From Ahmeh to Zushi Station 2004 DV, color, sound, 5 minutes
(SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Mum’s triangle fold for grocery bags 2007 Digital C-Print 22 1/2" x 36 1/4"
(SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Favela’s fold for fitted sheets (Detail) 2007, Digital C-Print, 22 1/2" x 36 1/4"
(SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Noni’s seamstress fold 2007, Digital C-Print, 22 1/2" x 36 1/4"
TAKE BACK THE LOVE: A June Jordan Celebration 6/13/03, Six Months
a mixin’ & matchin’ happenin’ 8/6/04, Pussyfoot Beauty Lounge
How to be an artist & activist at the same time 7/5/03, Crazyspace
LE’RATIONALE: Workshop in Empathy 4/16/05, Crazyspace NARUHODO! Za Wahrudo / OH I SEE! The World 2/4/05, Crazyspace
M-Y-MANIFESTO WORKSHOP: Fundraiser for the South Central Farmers 4/2/06, South Central Farm
EVERYTHING WRONG: The Knights of Shocking Difference 9/1-9/2, 2006, Highways Performance and Gallery Space NARUHODO! Za Wahrudo/ OH I SEE! The World 2/3/07, CUE Art Foundation
Plan for 1000 triangles for some peace 2007 1,000 grocery bag triangles bamboo, yarn
In Conversation: Cindy Bernard & Haruko Tanaka
HT: I love that part of it! These people who came up with the instructions, I’m sure at one point, had to let go and say, okay, we can’t spoonfeed everybody, we need to edit. I think that’s what I was attracted to. CB: There are always these abstractions of what the real experience of making it is. HT: Yeah, because at one point you are faced with the task of letting go—where, when and what do you let go? Of course you want to hold peoples’ hands but obviously you have to have faith and respect in your audience. CB: And the event that you’re doing for CUE is a variation on a Japanese quiz show? HT: Yes! It’s called NARUHODO! ZA WAHRUDO in Japanese. “Naruhodo” means, “hmm yes, I see, I get it,” and “Za wahrudo” means “the world.” It was this travel quiz show in the 80’s which I think they have recently brought back, where they had the funniest television announcers sent all over the globe, to all kinds of different cultures, to report back with questions about the local culture that Japanese celebrities back in the studio would then have to answer. The performance is a 40 minute program of 10 different quiz questions from 10 different places in the world that I have edited together. The footage however is not subtitled so there will be 3 real time translators on hand to translate. It’s so much fun because you get to go visit all these different places in 40 minutes, Japanese 80’s style. CB: What can you tell me about your new video? HT: Well the new video, which is totally in the works right now, is inspired by a trip that I made to the Natural History Museum right by USC. It was right around December of last year where I discovered they had this event called ‘First Fridays.’ What happens is you go there and they open up the museum…have you been?
Based on Japanese “Senbazuru” / Thousand cranes
CB: I’ve gone a couple of times. One evening was called “Opening Night/Sonic Scenery” and featured
“silent sets” by Tom Recchion, Matmos and Lanquis among others. Matmos was performing in the North American room in front of the bison diorama. I think the second time I went, it was actually called “Silent Sets” and Mike Watt playing solo bass. Although the musicians were playing live in the exhibit halls, you had to plug in with headphones to hear them. Or you could download a prerecorded soundtrack for the exhibits and walk around listening to that. It was great to see such a diverse crowd but odd to see everyone with headphones on….quiet but interesting. HT: The night I went it was a “First Friday” called “Reflecting Spirit” and it was in conjunction with the exhibit Collapse which was based on the book by Jared Diamond which talks about why civilizations collapse. So for $15 it was an evening packed full of different programs. The evening began with a screening of Edgy Lee’s film The Hawaiians – Reflecting Spirit in their auditorium and then we walked into the main building and up into one of the Mammals Halls which is filled with dioramas of animals. The setting was just unreal to me! They had five speakers that night—Neil and Kalikolihau Hannahs, father and daughter from the Kamehameha School in Hawaii; Senator Alan Lowenthal from Long Beach; Raymond Sauvajot, a scientist with the Santa Monica Mountains National Parks, and global ecologist Michael Tobias. Everyone came from such varied backgrounds, but what everyone seemed to agree on, and reflect in their own practices, was that in order for civilizations to continue, in order for the environment to heal and flourish, it would take a healthy and very real combination of history, technology, science, spirituality and creativity. And that was also reflected in the structure of the entire evening which didn’t end with the discussion. It continued on downstairs with an evening of music, dance, dj’s and vj’s. I was so blown away by the entire experience because it encompassed everything that is so interesting in my life—spirituality, politics, ancestry, environment, artistry, music…It was reaffirming to see an institution reflect that back. From that evening I realized that was exactly the structure that I wanted for my next film. So I have this structure and I will fill it in as I go along.
In Conversation: Cindy Bernard & Haruko Tanaka
Credits and acknowledgements
CB: This idea of combining different aspects of your life—your spirituality, your politics—has come up a few times. Do you see that as happening within your own work?
HT: If I look at my whole life as my practice, as my work, then I would say that these elements are definitely all there, as it is I’m sure for many people. But If I just look at the artwork, I’d say I’m just starting to do that. I’ve been able to do that in the events earlier on, and I think that this film/video is aiming to do that. I’m just starting.
California Telephone 2003
(SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Favela’s fold for fitted
The text is excerpted from the book of poetry Haruko/
sheets 2007
Love Poems by the late June Jordan (1936-2002)- poet,
Participants: Melvin Cortez, Ricardo Sebastian
essayist, novelist, and political activist. Participants: Savitri Young, Mari Okada, Terry Chatkupt,
(SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Noni’s seamstress fold
Tuan Nguyen, Melanie Nakaue, Kelvin Park, Mirabelle Ang
2007
Crew: Aigars Cepletis, Natalie Turner, Art Helterbraun Jr.,
Participant: Joni Gordon
Jeremy Edney, Roshni Sharma Event/Performance/Workshop collaborators: I Love You 2002
EVERYTHING WRONG: The Knights of Shocking Differ-
Participants:Bia Gayotto, Felicia Dickerson, Phil Mason,
ence - Seema D’poy Kapur, Loren Larry Knight Hartman
Kevin McCarty, Heather James, Kristin Ruger
M-Y-MANIFESTO Workshop Matt Dunnerstick
Cinematography:Adrià Julià
Le’Rationale: Workshop in Empathy - Wanda Smans a mixin’ & matchin’ happenin’ - Seema Kapur
Ue Wo Muite Arukou / Só Danço Samba 2003
How to be an artist & activist at the same time -
Made in collaboration with Bia Gayotto
Seema Kapur
Participants: Bia Gayotto, Naoko Sugibayashi, Maryam
TAKE BACK THE LOVE- A June Jordan Celebration
Kashani, Abdulla Al Muntheri, Becky Allen, Haruko Tanaka,
- Seema Kapur, Maryam Kashani, Noña Meko
Charles Karubian, Mauro Wernick Monteiro, Leticia Meza Crew: David P. Moore, Cameron Smith, Ian Smith, Ricardo
Documentation photograph on event flyers pages by
Sebastian
Barbara May
AROUND Special Registration 2003
Conversation text edited by Cindy Bernard and Haruko
Participant: Abdulla Al Mundari
Tanaka with additional help from Annetta Kapon
Crew: Haruko Tanaka, Matt Dunnerstick, Abdulla Al Mundari
Cindy Bernard: www.sound2cb.com, www.sassas.org Haruko Tanaka: www.kissoftheworld.net
(SOME OF) MY INHERITANCE: Mum’s triangle fold for grocery bags 2007 Participant: Felicia Dickerson
Biographies
Haruko Tanaka
Haruko Tanaka was born in Queens, New York in 1974. She was raised in England and Japan until her move to Los Angeles in 1992 to attend the University of Southern California. In 1997 she received her BA in Fine Arts and in 2003 completed her graduate studies with an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts. Her work ranges from photography and film/video to collaborative performance, events and workshops. Her short films have been screened at the Asian American International Film Festival at the Asia Society in New York City, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The New York Underground Film Festival, The Chicago Underground Film Festival, The Women of Color Film Festival, and The Museum of Modern Art. Her recent collaborations include a M-Y-MANIFESTO WORKSHOP at the South Central Farms in South Central, Los Angeles and a night of EVERYTHING WRONG: THE Knights of Shocking Difference at Highways Performance Space and Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. In 2005 Tanaka received an Emerging Artist Visual Arts Grant from the California Community Foundation. This exhibition at CUE will be her first New York City solo exhibition in New York. Haruko Tanaka lives, works and surfs in Los Angeles, in English, Japanese and some Spanish.
Cindy Bernard
Cindy Bernard is known for photographs and projections that explore the relationship between cinema, memory, and landscape including the widely exhibited series Ask the Dust. She has received numerous grants including Anonymous was A Woman (1998), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998) and a Los Angeles COLA Individual Artists Fellowship (2004). Since 1986, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as well as international collections. In addition to her visual practice, Bernard is creator of the experimental music series “sound.” as well as the founder of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS). Taking an active interest in instigating social exchange, Bernard founded SASSAS out of the need for a small sustainable organization dedicated to experimental music in Los Angeles. As Director of SASSAS, Bernard has produced concerts and sound events at the historic Schindler House in West Hollywood as well as at REDCAT and the Ford Amphitheatre working with artists such as Glenn Branca, Harold Budd, Nels Cline, Petra Haden, Joseph Jarman, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Recchion, Wadada Leo Smith, James Tenney and Roscoe Mitchell. Her interest in music and the public commons has spurred two projects: a series of photographs of municipal band shells which Bernard sees as an architecture of public exchange, most recently exhibited at Tracy Williams LTD in New York; and The Inquisitive Musician a collaboration with artist and translator David Hatcher based on a 17th century German satire, Musicus Curiosus, or Battalus, the Inquisitive Musician; the Struggle for Precedence between the Kunst Pfeifer and the Common Players. She is currently completing Year Long Loop, a year long documentation of the view and sounds outside her Los Angeles home. 24 hours in length, she describes it as a cross between John’s Cage’s 4’33” and Andy Warhol’s Empire.
Mission Statement
CUE Art Foundation
CUE Art Foundation, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit arts organization,
Board of Directors
is dedicated to providing a comprehensive creative forum for
Gregory Amenoff
contemporary art by supporting under-recognized artists via a
Theodore S. Berger
multi-faceted mission spanning the realms of gallery exhibitions,
Patricia Caesar
public programming, professional development programs and
Thomas G. Devine
arts-in-education. The Foundation was established in June of 2002
Thomas K. Y. Hsu
with the aim of providing educational programs for young artists
Brian D. Starer
and aspiring art professionals in New York and from around the country. These programs draw on the unique community of artists,
Advisory Council
critics, and educators brought together by the Foundation’s season
Gregory Amenoff
of exhibitions, public lectures, workshops, and its studio residency
William Corbett
program: all are designed to be of lasting practical benefit to
Vernon Fisher
aspiring and under-recognized artists. The entire CUE identity is
Malik Gaines
characterized by artistic quality, independent judgment and the
Deborah Kass
discovery of genuine talent, and provides long-term benefits both
Kris Kuramitsu
for creative individuals associated with CUE and the larger art
Jonathan Lethem
marketplace. Located in New York’s Chelsea gallery district, CUE’s
Irving Sandler
4,500 square feet of gallery, studio and office space serves as the nexus for educational programs and exhibitions conducted by CUE.
executive Director
Jeremy Adams Director of development
Elaine Bowen ISBN-13: 978-0-9791843-0-7 ISBN-10: 0-9791843-0-4
programs coordinator
All artwork © Haruko Tanaka
Beatrice Wolert-Weese
Catalog designed by Elizabeth Ellis programs assistant Printed on TriPine paper of KyeSung Paper Group (South Korea) Cover: TriPine Art Nouveau 209gsm (78lb), Text: TriPine Silk 157gsm (106lb) Printer: Yon Art Printing (South Korea)
Kara Smith