Laurel Nakadate

Laurel Nakadate (born 1975) is an American feminist video artist, filmmaker, and photographer. She is based in New York City.

Biography Laurel Nakadate was born 1975 in Austin, Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa.

Nakadate graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in 1998 from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Nakadate's work is displayed in numerous collections and museums around the United States, namely the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Princeton University Art Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, LACMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Saatchi Collection.

Nakadate's 2005 solo show at Danziger Projects, "Love Hotel and Other Stories", was featured in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and Flash Art. Art critic Jerry Saltz named her a "standout" in the 2005 "Greater New York" show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York

Since then, Nakadate's work has been exhibited at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Asia Society, New York; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Berlin Biennial; Grand Arts, Kansas City; and at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. A ten-year retrospective of her work, called Only the Lonely, was on view at MoMA PS1 from January 23 to August 8, 2011.

A cover interview with the artist appeared in the October 2006 issue of The Believer.

Nakadate's first feature-length film, Stay The Same Never Change, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on January 16, 2009, and was featured in the 2009 New Directors/New Films Festival at The Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Her second feature, The Wolf Knife, premiered at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, and was nominated for a 2010 Gotham Award and a 2011 Independent Spirit Award.

Nakadate currently lives and works in New York City and is the Director of Graduate Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Work Laurel Nakadate is known for creating video and photographic works that explore themes of sexuality, femininity and gender roles, and the knife-edge between vulnerability and power within chance encounters. Nakadate has often used herself as a subject within her work, documenting her interactions with strangers in various settings. Tonally, her work has been described as "disturbingly intimate"," as well as "creepy" art where "voyeurism, exhibitionism, and hostility merge with gullibility, cunning, and folly."

One of Nakadate’s first works was her film Happy Birthday (2000). In this film, Nakadate asked three men to celebrate her birthday with her in intimate, one-on-one encounters. Through these stranger interactions, Nakadate works to send the message that she is the one who controls the narrative.

Her collaboration with James Franco, a live performance titled Three Performances in Search of Tennessee (2011), was commissioned for Performa 11, the fourth edition of the Performa Biennial. Her newer photographic work, Relations, explores Nakadate's own genealogy through photos of distant relatives.

Reception New York Times critic Ken Johnson called her "smart and scarily adventurous."

Art critic John Yau, in an article in The Brooklyn Rail on her 2011 retrospective, writes to the artist: "You explore a more unstable terrain, always intent on making 'a narrow escape,' the only option you see for yourself. Meanwhile, the middle aged, potbellied man is condemned to pirouette, again and again. It is his one true moment of beauty and tenderness recorded for posterity—you have given him his 'narrow escape' and he knows it, as he does what he is told."

Nakadate uses her artwork to further discuss her Asian American identity by using ideas of “objectification, spectacle, and alienation." As pointed out by art critic John Yau on looking deeper into the messages of Nakadate's work “it doesn’t matter if an Asian American artist disavows race; she will be grouped as such because of an inherent institutional marginalization. And even despite the well-documented continuation of institutional racism and gender.”

Nakadate portrays post–Asian American ideals and Yau’s concepts in her Strangers and Relations (2014) piece. Nakadate does not appear in any of the photos in this collection and only depicts her white relatives, which she found through DNA testing. Refuting this point, The Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects of New York states that Nakadate's work sidesteps the fact that "everyone is acting" and that this concept is key to understanding Nakadate's work and her artfulness.