This article comes from Allergic’s 2024 Pride Month series, interviewing queer and trans elders in the arts community throughout June.
Carrie Yamaoka is something of an alchemist. Since the 1990s, she has been working at the intersection of photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, using her studio as a laboratory, as she puts it. But unlike traditional alchemists, Yamaoka’s goal isn’t to create a thing or achieve a goal. It’s the flow between states that destabilizes perception, refusing to settle, that fascinates her. It’s not that the artist doesn’t make things: She knows her materials intimately, including reflective polyester film and resin, and how to manipulate them—her works often have a shimmering, liquid-tactile surface that’s mesmerizing. But the more time spent with them, the less they feel like objects. Whether present or absent, like mirrors, they perform the same trick on the viewer standing in front of them, but their distortions make us become something other than ourselves.
As a queer Japanese American artist, Yamaoka is well aware of the nature of the visible and the invisible, but as she points out in interviews, there is power in the margins. She creates works that directly address sociopolitical issues, such as her Islands series (2019), photographs are printed with the names of places of detention in the United States, but even in her most abstract works, the uneasy dynamic between artwork and viewer reflects on important questions of identity and perception—who is seen or obscured, and how, and what can be subverted from these margins.
In addition to her own artistic practice, Yamaoka is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy, which has been taking to the streets for LGBTQ+ activism since 1991 and is still active today. In 2023, as part of the project, the group held an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Arm pain eager eternity: fierce pussy zoomincluding multiple exhibitions and publications. Yamaoka’s solo exhibition Inside Out The exhibition runs until June 29 at Ulterior Gallery in New York.
It’s easy to lose yourself in art, and it’s thrilling to lose yourself in it. Yamaoka is one of those artists, and her work is a space of light. As she said in our email conversation, quoting Leonard Cohen, “There are cracks in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.”
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allergy: Did you have any queer mentors when you were first starting out in art, or were there any queer figures who were important to you?
Kelly Yamaoka: I consider my art friends to be my mentors, most of whom are older than I am, some queer, some not. My partner, Joy Episalla, has been my mentor since we first met in 1978, and I have been her mentor. I remember coming to New York City the first summer after graduating from Wesleyan in 1979; we went to a talk/discussion at the AIR Gallery, where Harmony Hammond was gushing. I remember thinking: OK, I’m in the right place in this city, where we can be queer and/or feminist in the ways we’re all figuring out, and live as artists.
H: What obstacles have you faced in your career as a Japanese American artist? Do you feel the art world has become more inclusive?
Your Excellency: We live in a society that is rife with racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and it’s permeated at so many levels and so deeply ingrained. So yes, I’ve definitely faced challenges, some of which are less obvious. What I mean by that is that if you live and work on the margins, then the so-called mainstream may not see you as having anything to contribute unless you actively represent your identity in your work. There’s a lot of power in the margins, too. There’s more room for experimentation and disruption. I don’t want to sit at the table, I want to change the shape of the table—or abolish it altogether. While there has been a shift toward diversity, equity, and inclusion in recent years—many positions of power in art institutions have changed hands, promoting greater representation for artists of color, queer artists, and women—there’s still a lot of work to be done. We’re living through a scary time right now. Especially given the current political climate, the backlash, and the efforts of fascist Christian nationalists to destroy all the progress we’ve made.
H: How does your personal identity fit in with your art?
Your Excellency: Even though my work is not overtly themed, everything about my origins is embedded in my work. I am the product of diasporic forces—both Western and Eastern. Two of my grandparents immigrated to the United States from Japan in the late 19th century, a third around 1917, and the fourth is my maternal grandmother, a white Anglo/Irish woman who was disowned by her family for marrying a Japanese. World War II wreaked havoc on the lives of my parents and grandparents: internment, severe discrimination, deportation. I grew up in an all-white suburb of New York City in the 1960s, and we were the only family of color there. When I was 12, my mom decided to move to Tokyo to be closer to her father—a reverse diaspora—so I spent my teenage years there through high school, where I was a different kind of outsider.
I grew up in New York during the darkest years of the AIDS crisis, the 1980s and early 1990s. I learned so much about how we live, how we love, how we die, and how we survive during that time, from all the people we lost, from all the agitation, activism, and civil disobedience we did, that it deeply shaped the way I see the world. In 1994, I took a major turn in my practice, abandoning text, painting abstraction, and narrative, and that watershed moment was tied to everything we went through in those years.
H: How did the fierce cat come into being?
Your Excellency: Fierce Pussy was formed in 1991 by a group of people who were active in and outside of ACT UP. We wanted to channel the urgency and rebelliousness of the times we were living in, and put some energy into celebrating our identities, desires, and joys. In the original incarnation of Fierce Pussy, it was a very mobile, itinerant dyke band, people moved in and out, and we worked quickly, bombarding walls on the streets of New York with posters. The most recent incarnation of the group came in 2008, when AA Bronson invited Fierce Pussy to do a small retrospective at Printed Matter. We sent invitations to everyone who had participated, but only the four of us got back together: Nancy Brooks Brody, Zoe Leonard, Joy Episalla, and me. We realized through that process that we worked well together and still had things we wanted to say. So we’ve been working together as Fierce Pussy ever since. Brody passed away late last year, and we’re still grieving their loss. Now there are only three of us. Or rather, since Fierce Pussy are their own artists, there are four of us.
H: How does your artistic practice relate to your work on Fearless Pussy?
Your Excellency: Working in a group requires different muscles and skills than practicing individually. I was delighted to find that the movements and decisions we made as a group were the result of a group process – discussing countless options. It was nice to then be able to share all the hard work, and the results that came out of it – it was much less of a struggle than practicing individually. We laughed a lot. We each brought our own feelings to the work of fierce pussy, but now fierce pussy has become its own artist with its own unique voice.
H: Do you have any advice for young queer people in creative fields?
Your Excellency: Find your tribe. Or tribes. Cherish your friendships with other artists because it is from that love, camaraderie, and conversation that you find nourishment. If you have one or two, three or four people with whom you can share ideas and have a conversation, that is so important.
H: What are you doing?
Your Excellency: I have a personal exhibition. Inside Outis on view now at Ulterior Gallery in New York until Saturday, June 29. It feels like I haven’t shown a lot of work in my hometown in a long time, so this is very special for me. I’m working on a book project, a monograph, which will be published by Radius Books next May. I’m also starting to plan Chapter 8. Arm pain eager eternity: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: Fierce pussy zoom In collaboration with artist and curator Joe-ey Tang, it will open at Participant Inc. in early March 2025. The ongoing project connects the work of the four of us to each other and to the collective work of a fifth artist, fierce pussy.
H: Do you have anything else to add?
Your Excellency: I appreciate it Allergic I was invited to participate in this Pride Series even though I find the term “senior” problematic because it is a narrow categorization, one that feels ageist. My life and work right now are in many ways more dynamic, more challenging, and more exciting than ever before. For years I was referred to as an emerging artist—another unfortunate category—and then all of a sudden it seemed I had reached an age where I could no longer be called an emerging artist. Hopefully we are all emerging artists and always will be.
