Ward Yoshimoto was born in Los Angeles, California. Growing up in the industrial suburbs of Los Angeles, Yoshimoto felt the polarizing forces of his Japanese American heritage and the growing plasticity of the Suburban American dream. He draws on the turbulent social and political landscape of his youth, his encyclopedic knowledge of art history and pop culture, varied experiences ranging from traditional Japanese brush-painting to film making, and commercial photography. He has lived and worked in New York for over the past thirty years as a commercial photographer and fine artist.
He attended CSU Dominguez Hills as a design and studio major, and then in 1984 received his B.F.A. in photography from The Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. He moved to NYC in 1985 to start a photography studio in the photo district. In 1999 he received his M.F.A. in sculpture from Brooklyn College. He has shown both nationally and internationally along with being the director and founding member of the international art group ICOBA.
His new works, by using hardware cloth as a structural material, have an instant grid format and a mathematical relationship to space. In this way he is able to have a dialog within his work referencing architecture, minimalism, photography, virtual space, and digital media. Yoshimoto commingles American and Japanese traditions and craftsmanship in his deft assemblages of found objects. Referencing Dada, Surrealism, and Pop, as well as the turbulent social and political landscape of his youth, Yoshimoto’s wry constructions address an ongoing history of cultural displacement with equal parts iconoclastic brio and meditative, almost obsessive rigor. He has lived in Brooklyn since 1992 and his sculpture studio is in Red Hook Brooklyn. His previous studios have been at the Calder Center in TriBeCa and in LIC at the Crane Street Studios/5Pointz building.
At MacDowell Ward worked on and competed large assemblage pieces and a series of works using materials and objects found in or around Peterborough. The previous summer, he participated in a group show in NYC and has a solo show in Paris, France and Spree Gallery, NY.
