Events added, rescheduled for art exhibit

Artist will discuss her textile paintings at Cal Lutheran

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Laura Kina will present a lecture at 6 p.m. Sept. 29 in Overton Hall.

(THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. – July 29, 2016) The closing date and reception for an exhibit of textile-based paintings at California Lutheran University have been moved up to Oct. 1 and a lecture by the artist has been added on Sept. 29.

The artist’s reception for “Uchinanchu: The Art of Laura Kina” will begin at 6 p.m. Oct. 1 in the Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Culture on the Thousand Oaks campus. Kina will present a lecture at 6 p.m. Sept. 29 in nearby Overton Hall.

The exhibit explores mixed-race identity, indigenous communities, colonization and globalized pop culture. The artwork in Kina’s new series is autobiographical. Born in Riverside in 1973 to an Okinawan father from Hawaii and a Spanish-Basque/Anglo mother, she was raised in a small Norwegian town in the the Pacific Northwest. She now lives in Chicago. 

“Uchinanchu” is the term for for Hawaiian residents of Okinawan heritage. In her artwork, Kina combines hand-painted Okinawan and Hawaiian motifs, textiles and quilts traditionally made by women, and contemporary westernized and American-Asian pop culture T-shirts. Using the form of a patchwork quilt as a starting point, her colorful large-scale tapestries demonstrate how the assimilation of her multiple cultures folds meticulously into one personal, yet collective, journey.

“My artwork focuses on themes of distance, belonging and cultural reclamation,” Kina explains. “Taken together, the works are about islands of diaspora and explore themes of transnational family ties and heritage tourism, mixed-ness, ethnic pride and solidarity, military and colonial histories, and current geopolitical military/environment issues in Okinawa and Hawaii.” 

Kina’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Japanese American National Museum and the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum.

She serves as a Vincent de Paul Professor of Art, Media & Design at DePaul University and as a board member of the Association for Asian American Studies. She co-founded the biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference. Kina was co-editor of the 2013 book “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art.”

Admission to the events and exhibit is free. The gallery is located in the Soiland Humanities Center at 120 Memorial Parkway and Overton Hall is next to it. The gallery is open to the public from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday. For more information, contact curator Rachel Schmid at rtschmid@callutheran.edu or 805-493-3697 or visit CalLutheran.edu/kwanfong.

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