| Leah Oates: What is your background, and when did you know you would be an artist? Jacob Hashimoto: Most of my childhood was spent in Walla Walla, a small silent town of farms and colleges in dusty southeastern Washington. My parents, who both worked at Whitman College, were always very supportive and interested in the arts, and encouraged both my sister and me to study music and (to a lesser degree) the visual arts. My mother actually was kind of a studio art weekend warrior. |
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Jacob Hashimoto, interviewed by Leah Oates
Leah Oates: What is your background, and when did you know you would be an artist?
Jacob Hashimoto: Most of my childhood was spent in Walla Walla, a small silent town of farms and colleges in dusty southeastern Washington. My parents, who both worked at Whitman College, were always very supportive and interested in the arts, and encouraged both my sister and me to study music and (to a lesser degree) the visual arts. My mother actually was kind of a studio art weekend warrior. She was a studio art major in college, and often took printmaking and painting classes at Whitman. In all of our houses as we were growing up, she managed to have a room that was her little studio, a chaotic laboratory of torn paper, spray cans, respirators, string, and glue. I remember her sitting in the park one junior high school winter, drawing the leafless catalpa trees. She always encouraged us to work on projects as well, but my sister and I pretty much ignored her, choosing to spend most of our free time exploring American teenage pastimes—playing sports, underage drinking, and blowing stuff up, sometimes in combination. I more or less drifted through these Walla Walla years, without much ambition other than getting out for college when I was 18. I spent a lot of afternoons slogging paper bags full of old tennis balls down to the public park to practice my serve or blissed out in front of the television. My creative output was pretty much limited to doodling through endless calculus pop quizzes.
Until I got to college, I don’t think that I ever really considered being an artist. That’s not to say I didn’t draw or have a strong inclination toward the arts, but I don’t think that I thought too much past getting out of Walla Walla. I remember, early freshman year, taking the bus up to the Walker Art Center from Northfield, MN. At the Walker, I saw my first Kiefers, Rothkos, Beuys, Anne Hamiltons, Barbara Krugers, Jenny Holzers, and countless others. Up to that point, I don’t think that I had actually ever seen a show of contemporary art. It’s crazy to think about it now, but we never traveled much when I was a kid and Walla Walla didn’t, at the time, have much in the way of contemporary art. It was an indescribable experience. I think that at that point, I started thinking about having some kind of career in the arts and slowly, over the next year, my interest steadily grew, finally crushing out all other interests or pursuits. By the end of sophomore year I ended up dropping out of the liberal arts college that I was attending and transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in order to take advantage of the museum and a more intense and diverse studio program.
LO: What do you think is an artist and what has being an artist meant to you?
JH: I don’t know if I can answer the first part of that question very well without sounding like a complete idiot, but here’s a perhaps foolish and vague definition. I guess, in general, I think that an artist is someone or a group of someones who create stuff that allows us to learn something about the world and our place in it. Obviously there’s an argument to be made that anything can be art and anyone an artist, and I suppose that that’s a nice thought. I, however, feel like the primary difference in my mind is that a good or effective artist has the ability to communicate something powerfully with his/her/their audience, whether it is joy, sadness, clarity, control, hope, fear, revulsion, or what have you. Artists generate more questions than answers. Artists make people curious. In truth, I think that most of us are constantly learning and relearning what it means to be an artist, and I know that my definition has definitely broadened over my career. I think that having a daily definition of what makes an artist is useful in the studio, but it’s important to allow that definition to change as you move through your life and your studio practice.
Personally speaking, art and being an artist have shaped my entire adult life. So it means a lot! I think that for me, being an artist in the studio is a constant challenge toward uncomfortability, and that can be pretty disappointing and often difficult. I’m sure that the daily toil of failure and success has filtered through to my broader worldview and shaped it for good or ill—as I’m sure as well that it’s taught me to be more patient and make slower, more thoughtful decisions outside the studio. I must say that being a professional artist is a little bit different than I expected. The battle between my studio practice and the commercial gallery and museum world is a constant strain, and I think it is in many ways inhibiting. That’s not to say that I don’t greatly value the time that selling work allows me in the studio, and that I don’t value and enjoy the relationships that I have with my dealers and collectors. I do, but, I feel that sometimes working on commissions and for art fairs, crowds the delicate creative balance in my studio practice.
LO: Please explain the themes in your artwork and your working process in studio.
JH: Thematically, my work moves around quite a bit within a fairly narrow neighborhood. The core of the work formally has always been landscape-based abstraction and the history of painting and printmaking. Using this as a foundation, I have been able to shift the work from its early emphasis on grid-based abstraction and minimalism to more painterly works that tend to use the modular format of the work to reference everything from board games to Peter Halley to Murakami to Marden to Buckminster Fuller to Bridget Riley, to Maya Lin, and on and on. Much of the work couches these references in a landscape visual space, allowing the image to oscillate between small individual collaged compositions and visually spacious overall compositions.
As evidenced by the work, my studio practice tends to be pretty hands-on. I work with about four assistants on the artworks, and my role for the most part is to coordinate between the overall concept and composition of the works. Most days my assistants and I sit around a big table working on the kite-like elements that comprise each artwork—it’s kind of a knitting circle—and tie knots, fold and trim paper, build frames, and listen to a dangerous amount of NPR. At some point, I was trying to explain my studio practice to a dealer, and I mentioned that my studio practice was something like baking sourdough bread. We are constantly making new parts and new little collages, and feeding it to the mother. The mother in this case [is] a bunch of containers that house the finished pieces before they are collected into an artwork. When it finally comes time to work on the final artworks, I’ll dip into the mother, scoop out what I need, add some other ingredients, and make a work. All the time we’re still adding any and every idea that enters the world of the studio. We constantly feed the mother, and the mother slowly changes.
