Natalia Nakazawa
Natalia Nakazawa (b. 1982, Charlotte, NC) is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work spans painting, textiles, and social practice. As a child of Latin American (Uruguayan) and Asian (Japanese American, yonsei) diasporas, she draws on complex cultural legacies to explore identity, migration, and storytelling. Through collaborative, community-driven projects, Nakazawa blurs the boundaries between education, activism, and art, inviting collective participation. Her jacquard textiles incorporate images from open-access museum collections, often highlighting historical moments of cultural exchange.These works serve as tactile archives; places to critically engage with memory. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts, an MSEd from Queens College, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been shown at institutions including The Met, Wave Hill, and Kunsthal Extra City. Nakazawa has participated in numerous residencies and her work is held in collections such as The Rockefeller Foundation and Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Artworks
This project expands a multi-year storytelling textile project called, Our Stories of Migration. It is aimed at creating impactful spaces that amplify, reflect on, and make tangible the intergenerational stories of immigrant, migrant, Latine/x, Asian, and multi-racial New Yorkers. Holding ideas of dislocation, relocation, adaptation, and touching directly on the prompt: How might we navigate the delicate balance between cultural preservation (and by extension ecological, land-based knowledge) and community needs to create a more resilient future? Nakazawa has been evolving and iterating this socially engaged project since 2017 when executive order 13769 (named “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry to the United States”) was issued, banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries and suspending Syrian refugee resettlement.
For this important chapter of the project, the artist draws inspiration from the Puerto Rican activist organization CHARAS, who, in collaboration with architect R. Buckminster Fuller, built two geodesic domes from September 1972 to January 1973 as alternative models for housing, culture, and environmental sustainability.
For the fellowship, Natalia will develop and construct two mobile, living archives that will feature oral histories, scanned personal objects that represent complex journeys, and hand-embroidered community maps.
Learn more and download the AR app here.