Toshiko Takaezu Retrospective Exhibit Opens This Month
One of Hawai‘i’s best-known artists is honored with a deep dive into her work.
Toshiko Takaezu admiring one of her pots around the late 1950s. Photo: John Paul Miller, Courtesy of the American Craft Council Library & Archives. © Family of Toshiko Takaezu
This month, fans of groundbreaking Hawai‘i-born artist Toshiko Takaezu are in for a treat, as a nationally touring retrospective of her work—the first in 20 years—opens at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York City. Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within showcases hundreds of pieces from the late artist’s body of work, from her most famous closed ceramic forms to woven textiles. Beginning in April, it will be accompanied by a lofty monograph.
Co-curator and local sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for music for a string orchestra piece inspired by art at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. Her work focused on pieces at the museum at its opening in 1988, including one of Takaezu’s. Lanzilotti’s mother, Louise Keali‘iloma King Lanzilotti, was the museum’s first curator of education. “I don’t remember her,” Leilehua says of Takaezu, who died in 2011. “But I know my mom interviewed her. She was around all the time at the museum.”
That connection is one of many that led Lanzilotti to this project. To bring Takaezu’s works to life, she created a 15-minute demonstration video in which she picks up ceramic pieces and rolls them around so viewers can hear the rattle of clay inside. She also directed a 46-minute sound and video installation of a new work she wrote using the rattling sounds. Both videos are part of the exhibition.
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Takaezu often pointed to the importance of the darkness within her closed sculptures, hence the exhibition’s title. “As somebody from Hawai‘i, that feels like inherently a very Hawai‘i thing. … On the surface, this is a very beautiful place, but what makes this such a special place is that connection to place, those relationships and that connection to land, and that quiet calm within,” Lanzilotti says.
The retrospective will travel to museums in Detroit; Houston; and Madison, Wisconsin, before closing its run at the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2026. While each location offers its own programming, Lanzilotti recommends experiencing it at the Noguchi Museum, where visitors will be able to handle some of Takaezu’s precious works. Its run there ends in July.
