ARTIST TALKS
2016 Artist Talk, "MoMA Prime Time Exchange" How can we bring different generation together? Co-produced by MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) at The Museum of Modern Art
2016 Artist Talk, "Art + Inter-generational Exchange", co-produced by More Art and Artist Volunteer Center and a part of the ArtsEverywhere/Musagetes Artist Round Table series, moderated by Queens Museum Staff. At Queens Museum
2010 Guest Panelist, "Brainstorm! Selling Work Online", A presentation of the Asian American Arts Alliance, co-produced by the Queens Council on the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts. At New York Foundation for the Arts
HIDEMI TAKAGI
ARTIST STATEMENT
I'm a photographer, multimedia artist, storyteller and social practitioner with a strong history of working with various immigrant and underserved communities on projects that include photography as well as public-engagement and installation elements. As an immigrant from Japan, with a Haitian husband who was born in Haiti and grew up in Brooklyn and biracial daughter raised in Brooklyn, I'm interested in the mixing of those history and local culture.
For my past photography projects, I engaged with multiple marginalized communities within my NYC home neighborhood, Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn — to photograph the color, joy and life of the people who are living in those diverse communities. I wanted to create something with a high value of meaningfulness for a handful of people who would be moved and feel grateful.
With these artworks, I explore the intimacies of public engagement in different ways. It’s spending months getting to know senior citizens to learn and tell their stories, working collaboratively with Bed-Stuy neighbors on outdoor portraits, or immersing in barbershop environments to visually profile place as well as individuals, I build dialogues to go deeply into diverse processes of back-and-forth articulating and listening, as well as creating aesthetics of visual display.