Giant Robot Store and GR2 News

  It’s always an honor when an article I write is good enough to get to the Discover Nikkei site. The 99 Years No Ai piece (no pirate pun here) made it. It’s been merely a three year drought. Discover Nikkei is via the Japanese American National Museum. Yes, I’ve worked on Two Biennale exhibitions, the Zen Garage, and other projects, so nepotism doesn’t work there, so I’m hoping I did a decent job with it.
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  Ruth Asawa is a mid century modern related artist who gets little recognition. She does have work in numerous museums, had a solo exhibition at JANM, and now a school. The SF School of the Arts. It’s already on their website. I’m not sure if it’s changing their curriculum, but just the name value is amazing. From Ruth Asawa’s website: “In 1982, Asawa focuses her energy on building a public high school for the arts, School of the Arts (SOTA) High School. Her dream is to house SOTA in the heart of civic center so that it is in close proximity to San Francisco’s world class cultural organizations — the San Francisco Opera, Ballet, Museum of Modern Art, the Asian Art Museum, American Conservatory Theater, the Main Library, and the Symphony. Students will be able to attend a public high school where the standards are high and where they can achieve their own individual potential — as artists, as future parents, and as community members — whether they go on to become professional artists are not.”
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I’m writing the extended version of my two minute pecha-kucha presentation at the Little Tokyo Design Week. My job was to formulate a few images into something presentable with the topic of Future City. Earlier that day, I walked through a display featuring Apollo 11 moon landing imagery from the Expo ’70. Both events were monumental and it brought me to the realization that a Future City is based on dreams.

One can only imagine what it was like to live though the space race. Technology was just getting interesting. Room sized computers did nothing that we could comprehend. By placing a man on the moon, a new generation of imagination began. My mother and father watched the live broadcast of the moon walk like almost everyone else. Two weeks later, I was born.

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Giant Robot at Little Tokyo Design Week. I’m a bit behind on the LTDW posts. There’ll be one more post up soon. These photos are from Friday which was slow in our area. It was packed at the JACCC which was screening Totoro and featured another 10 containers, an alcohol area, and a swarm of people. The evening led to nice photos.

 

Little Bony for you. The little dude fit perfectly in the container as if he were a product.

 

Martin Hsu who now lives in SF. He’ll be showing at Giant Robot 2 later this year.

 

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Stan Sakai, one of the more unheralded comics artists and creator of Usagi Yojimbo finally has an exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum. It’s another pop culture exhibition on display at a museum. Just a a few years ago, comics weren’t okay at museums – it was controversial, and now it’s ok. Toys are fine too.

Here are some photo highlights (the Geof Darrow drawing is amazing)

 

See the photos below

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