Kinji Akagawa

Birth

1940 (Tokyo, Japan)

In the summer of 1965, Japanese-born artist Kinji Akagawa received a fellowship to apprentice as a printer at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The experience was transformative for Akagawa, who collaborated with more than a dozen different artists during his stint at the workshop. As he worked closely with his colleagues, studying a range of printing techniques, he came to value the physical and conceptual process of printmaking as much as the finished prints themselves. “Art making is life making,” Akagawa has said. When artists work together in a spirit of collaboration, to his mind they participate in a democratic vision of society. The Carter is home to more than 50 lithographs that Akagawa created or printed at Tamarind, including works by Ruth Asawa, Herbert Bayer, and George Sugarman.