Tom Nakashima
bio Tom Nakashima was born in Seattle and received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Notre Dame. He is emer - itus professor at the Catholic University of America and Morris Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Augusta University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Corcoran, Smithsonian Ameri- can Art Museum; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Caro- lina; and the Long Beach Museum of Art, California. He has received awards including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship; Walter Gropius Master Artist, Huntington Museum; Awards in the Visual Arts 11, DC Commission on Arts & Humanities (1984, 1988, and 1989); the Mayor’s Award for Excellence, Washing- ton, DC; Mid-Atlantic Visual Arts Fellowship (1992 and 1996); Virginia Commission for the Arts; and National Printmaking Fellowship (NEA), Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking.
artist’s statement In this postmodern era I find myself an artist existing outside my time. No—you can’t go back, and I wouldn’t want to—not to modernism. I ascribe a great deal of value to order, purity, and integrity. I sit in the debris of the classical world and existentialism, trying to hold onto the idea of “essence as noun”—the essence of good and evil, of Kant’s sublime. My desire is to imbed my work with some quality that predates definition. I confess to having moved forward to find great in - terest in Kierkegaard, but I am too romantic to take the “leap” toward Heidegger and Continental philosophy. I did not miss the boat—I just took another one. There is much that appeals to me within the worlds of postmodern philosophy and art. There is a lot of good art being referred to as postmodern— but postmodern it isn’t. Georgia Red
Georgia Red
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