Linda Nishio

Linda Nishio (born 1952) is a Japanese-American artist whose conceptual pieces focus on self-image and issues of representation, using photographs, text, performance, and film. She worked at the Women's Graphic Center of the Women's Building. Among other work, Nishio created the logo for New World Pictures for film director Roger Corman. She taught at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and her work was included in the 2011 citywide exhibition, "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980."

Early life

Raised in Los Angeles, Nishio is a third-generation Japanese-American (sansei) whose parents were two of the 120,000 forcibly relocated Japanese Americans during World War II. She studied art at the University of Kansas and received her Master's of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, where she studied with Geoffrey Hendricks. Her first studio was also at the Women's Building.

Career Nishio's first public performance, Cheap Talk (Great Wall Series), took place at the Franklin Furnace in New York in 1979. The work combined written and spoken text, slides and film images. She performed Ghost in the Machine two years later at the same space, which was reviewed by Lucy Lippard for the Village Voice, and included in her 1984 book, Get the Message: A Decade of Art for Social Change. Another nonprofit space that showed Nishio's work early in her career (Cheap Talk, in 1980 ) was LACE in Los Angeles. Her work is in the Artwords and Bookworks collections at the University of Iowa.

In describing her work of this period, Nishio has said, ""The artwork was all about ... the personal is the political. How I saw the world was the material for the artwork, so instead of maybe painting self-portraits, I was making performance: The performance was the self-portrait." and participated in the 2011 exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum, "Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design & Activism in Post-War Los Angeles," part the citywide exhibition, Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980.

Selected works Cheap Talk (Great Wall Series), 1979 Ghost in the Machine, 1981 Protekshun (and the Desire to Surrender), installation, 1993