Shigeko Kubota brought a singular sensibility to her extensive body of video sculptures, multi-media installations, and single-channel videos. Over her five-decade career, Kubota forged a lyrical confluence of the personal and the technological, often merging vibrant electronic processing techniques with images and objects of nature, art and everyday life. Her distinctive fusions of the organic, the art historical and the electronic are at once poetic and witty.
Kubota was born in 1937 in Niigata, Japan and died in 2015. She received a B.A. in sculpture from Tokyo University of Education, and studied at New York University and the New School for Social Research. In 1964, she moved to New York; in the same year she became the Vice Chairman of the Fluxus Organization.
An active participant in the international Fluxus art movement in the 1960s, Kubota was strongly influenced by the art and theories of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Focusing on several, often interconnected themes, her works include installations that pay direct homage to Duchampian ideas and icons (the Meta-Marcel and Duchampiana series, which includes the video sculpture Nude Descending a Staircase, 1976); those that reference Japanese spiritual traditions of nature and landscape, particularly water and mountains (River, 1981, Niagara Falls, 1985); and an ongoing, diaristic project of chronicling her personal life on video.
She taught at the School of Visual Arts, and was video artist-in-residence at both Brown University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1974 to 1982 she was the video curator at Anthology Film Archives. Kubota was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Fellowship in Berlin, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, New York State Council on the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and an NEA/ Visual Arts grant.
She exhibited her work widely, including solo exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York (1975), Rene Block Gallery, New York (1976, 77), Long Beach Museum of Art (1977), Japan Society, New York (1978, 83), the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York (1991, toured to Hara Museum, Tokyo and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Whitney Museum (1996), and international group exhibitions including Documenta, Kassel (1977, 1987), Whitney Biennial (1983), and Venice Biennale (1993).
Recent retrospectives include Viva Video! The Art and Life of Shigeko Kubota, at Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Art, Osaka, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2021–22) and Liquid Reality at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021).
