Carrie Yamaoka is a New York-based visual artist working in the expanded field of painting. Her work investigates issues of subjectivity, authorship, visibility and perception. Her working methods embrace error and defect, the slippage of material protocols, negotiations with chance and the trajectories that follow from engaging in and breaking the rules of process.
Exhibiting widely in the US and Europe since the 1980s, Yamaoka’s work has been featured in Greater New York 2015 at MoMA/PS1, and in exhibitions at the Mannheimer Kunstverein, CAN Neuchatel, MMKA, the Wexner Center, the Albright-Knox, MassMOCA and Artists Space, among other venues. She has had solo exhibitions at Debs & Co, Paul Kasmin, Lucien Terras, and Storefront Bushwick in New York.
She received a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She was a recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman award (2017) and a grant from ArtMatters (1988). Her work has been featured and reviewed in Artforum, the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Interview and Art in America. Roberta Smith of the New York Times wrote: “her efforts intimate a rejuvenation of Minimalism, spurred by new materials, more refined techniques and fresh ideas.” Ken Johnson, also in the New York Times, called her work “ a seductive marriage of voluptuous materialism and rigorous formalism.” She is on the part-time faculty in the MFA Fine Arts programs at Parson School of Design.
Yamaoka is also a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. Recently her work has appeared this past season in arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla /Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified at Beeler Gallery, CCAD, Columbus, Ohio. The project will travel to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia this fall. Her first solo museum exhibition recto/verso will open at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, in July 2019.
“72 by 45 (wall)” 2016, reflective mylar, urethane resin and mixed media on wood panel, 72 x 45 inches
On April 9, 2019, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of 168 scholars, artists, and writers. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s ninety-fifth competition.
