the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky (2023) merges hidden sounds within Takaezu’s closed forms with images of Hawaiʻi Island, creating a visual and sonic meditation on a living, breathing landscape.

Leilehua Lanzilotti is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, and curator whose practice explores radical indigenous contemporaneity, integrating community engagement into the heart of projects. By world-building through multimedia installation works and nontraditional concert experiences/musical interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect. Uplifting others by crafting projects that support both local communities and economy, the work inspires hope to continue. leilehualanzilotti.com

Yu-Me (1972) is a dream-like artist film and unconventional self-portrait through a visual journey across the surface of Takaezu’s earthenware pot, resembling an aerial survey over vast landscapes.

Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011) was instrumental in the post-war reconceptualization of ceramics from the functional craft tradition to the realm of fine art. Following the utilitarian vessels and pots of her early years, the artist progressively abstracted her forms to arrive at her signature rounded, closed form. The enclosed space—as metaphor for the human spirit, or as an evocation of its own micro universe—is unseen yet still has a powerful and mysterious presence. Today, her home and studio, established in 1975 in Quakertown, New Jersey is preserved as the Toshiko Takaezu Studio and continues to be used as a creative workplace by students and artists alike.

Mud Man (2017) tells a story of a community visited by bird droppings falling from the sky like clumps of mud, weaving together sound, memory, and inheritance with questions of autonomy, sovereignty, and occupation. 

Chikako Yamashiro engages with political and social histories of Okinawa to create haunting works drawing on oral accounts. Her work reveals lesser-known aspects of Okinawa’s contemporary reality, while questioning dominant historical accounts of Japanese and American occupation of the islands. The site of fierce battles between the United States and Japan at the end of World War II, Okinawa still has a high concentration of American military bases, occupying around twenty percent of the land—despite the wish of many of its natives. Yamashiro’s work spans performance, filmmaking and photography, employing bodies as vehicles through which to carry stories from marginalized voices, bodies and souls from Okinawa, through uniquely poetic imaginings.

Fields Fallen from Distant Songs (2023) brings together archival images of colonial Hawaiʻi with hole hole bushi songs sung by Japanese immigrant sugarcane plantation workers to consider the legacies of extraction, migration, and displacement.

Maya Jeffereis is an artist and filmmaker whose work in video, performance, and installation seeks to expand upon overlooked histories and fill in archival gaps with counter narratives, personal histories, and speculative fictions. Jeffereis’s work has been presented in the United States and internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, and Queens Museum, among other institutions. She teaches art, art history, and Asian American Studies at Parsons School of Design at The New School and Hunter College (CUNY). She earned an MFA from Hunter College and BA and BFA from the University of Washington. mayajeffereis.com