Lynne Yamamoto

Lynne Yamamoto (born 1961) is a New England-based artist and educator known for sculpture, architectural structures and installations. Her work uses material and spatial strategies to connect ordinary personal histories and objects to broader events and sociocultural themes such as migration, cross-cultural influence, nationality, labor and domestic life. Art historian Margo Machida writes of her work, "Through evocative assemblies of objects, a hands-on artisanal use of materials and a research-based investigative approach, the artist suggests the generative possibilities of the local when conceived within larger contexts."

Yamamoto's work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum, among others.

Career, exhibitions and education Yamamoto was born in Honolulu, Hawai'i in 1961. Whitney Museum at Philip Morris (1999), P.P.O.W. (2001, 2004, 2011), among other venues. She was featured in surveys at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Honolulu Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Academy Museum, and New Museum.

Yamamoto has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Artist Research program and Rockefeller Foundation, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, LEF Foundation, Penny McCall Foundation and Creative Capital, among others. She was awarded artist residencies by Banff Centre for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Center, Kohler Arts Center, Montalvo Arts Center, and PS1, among others.

Work and reception Yamamoto uses a repertoire of images, materials, objects, and architectonic forms, working from the personal and particular outward to larger narratives involving culture, ethnicity, colonialism and migration. These devices are said in different cases to counterbalance or enhance lyrical and evocative aspects of the work that derive from her use of intimate, conceptually driven objects. The related Borrowed Time (2017) mixed the styles of middle-manager (front) and worker dwellings (back), evoking the ways homes communicated hierarchy in plantation culture. Lynne Yamamoto, House for Listening to Rain, Dimensions of house: 7'w x 9'l, 5' to 6'h, 2011, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI.

Yamamoto based Whither House (2015–16, Wing Luke Museum) on a photo she found of an early 20th-century "tent house" taken near Wapato, Washington. Tent houses were homes for itinerant immigrant farmers made to be carted away or dismantled and carried. In her recreation, the windowless walls were made of silk rather than canvas, the peaked roof was stretched to the gallery's high ceiling, and the corners rested on crude wheel shapes cut from logs—details intended to convey qualities of aspiration, adaptation, improvisation and mobility. Blanton Museum of Art, Bronx Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Central Library, Smith College Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum, among others.