User:Mike.DiMaggio/sandbox

Laura Kina
Born	1973 Riverside, California
Nationality	Okinawan and Spanish-Basque/Anglo
Education	MFA Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001
Notable work	Blue Hawaii, Sugar, A Many-Splendored Thing, Aloha Dreams, Loving, Hapa Soap Operas
Style	Pop Art
Website	http://www.laurakina.com/index.html

"You won’t find Elvis or surfboards or funny umbrella-topped cocktails in Laura Kina’s dystopic Blue Hawaiʻi. Drawn from family albums, oral history and community archives from Hawaii and Okinawa, these ghostly oil paintings employ distilled memories to investigate themes of distance, longing, and belonging.

Featuring new works and a selection from her ongoing Sugar series (2009-present), the setting is Kina’s father’s Okinawan sugarcane field plantation community, Piʻihonua, on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi near Hilo. Her obsession with blue was inspired by the indigo-dyed kasuri kimonos repurposed by the Issei (first generation) “picture bride” immigrants for canefield work clothes, and colored by stories of hinotama (fireballs) shooting from the canefield cemetery into the night sky. Blue Hawaiʻi echoes the spirits of Kina’s ancestors and shared histories of labor migration."

References

"Laura Kina (born 1973) is an artist, academic and important contributor to the emergent field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. Kina was born in Riverside, CA. and raised in Poulsbo, WA. She moved to Chicago, IL. in 1991 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with Michiko Itatani and Ray Yoshida, earning her B.F.A. in 1994. In 2001, Kina received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she studied under noted painters Kerry James Marshall and Phyllis Bramson.

Drawing inspiration from popular culture, art history, textile design, historic photographs and personal and family photos, her works focus on the fluidity of cultural difference and the slipperiness of identity. Asian American history and mixed race representations are subjects that run through her work. Colorful pattern fields combined with figurative elements and subtle narratives characterize her paintings. Kina is mixed race Asian American. On her father’s side, she is a descendant of Okinawan sugar cane plantation workers from Piihonua on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Her maternal grandmother was Spanish/Basque from Vallejo, CA. and her maternal grandfather was French, English, Irish, and Dutch from Waco, TX.

Laura Kina is Associate Professor of Art, Media, & Design at DePaul University, Vincent DePaul Distinguished Professor, and Director of Asian American Studies. She helped found DePaul’s Asian American Studies program in 2005. Her work is represented by Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami, FL. She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Kina’s work was included in The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, Chicago, IL in 2007-2008 and the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, MA in 2008.

Laura Kina received her MFA Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001 and her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. She is a Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media, and Design and an affiliated faculty member of American Studies, Global Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at DePaul University. 

Born in Riverside, California in 1973 to an Okinawan father from Hawai’i and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, Kina was raised in Poulsbo, WA, a small Norwegian town in the Pacific Northwest. The artist currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has shown nationally and internationally. Her solo shows include: Blue Hawaii (University of Memphis, 2014); Sugar (Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, 2010); A Many-Splendored Thing (Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL 2010); Aloha Dreams and Hapa Soap Operas (Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts, Miami, FL 2007 and 2003); and Loving (Grand Projects, New Haven, CT 2006). Between 2009-2013 the works in Kina's Devon Avenue Sampler series traveled to six venues in India and the U.S. as part of a two-woman show Indigo: Laura Kina and Shelly Jyoti. Her artwork has been published on the cover of Franklin Odo'sVoices from the Canefields: Folks Songs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawaiii; Cathy Schlund-Vial's Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing; and in Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, Embracing Ambiguity: Faces of the Future, and The New Authentics: Artists of the Post-Jewish Generation. Her 2011 "Issei" painting was featured in the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center's traveling banner exhibition "I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story."

Kina is the Midwest coordinator for the Diasporic Asian Arts Network and a member of the International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research. She serves on the board member of The Japanese American Service Committee in Chicago and as an advisory board member of MAVIN in Seattle. She is a founding member of the Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) biennial conference and a founding member and consulting editor of the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies and reviews editor for the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Kina, along with Wei Ming Dariotis, is the coeditor of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art (University of Washington Press, 2013) and a co-curator of a related exhibition of the same title at the DePaul University Art Museum (April 25-June 30, 2013) and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience (August 9, 2013-January 19, 2014). War Baby/Love Child was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts 2012 Art Works grant. Diversity MBA Magazine selected Kina as one of the 2012 "Top 100 Executives & Emerging Leaders Under 50." She is currently working on an anthology with art historian Jan Christian Bernabe titled Que(e)rying Contemporary Asian American Art."