A Conversation: Sadamasa Motonaga
with Rika Hiro, Yasufumi Nakamori, and Gabriel Ritter
at Karma Los Angeles
Wednesday, May 29, 6–7 pm

Karma presents a conversation between curators Rika Hiro and Gabriel Ritter, moderated by curator Yasufumi Nakamori, on the occasion of Sadamasa Motonaga’s exhibition at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, on view from May 23–July 19, 2024.

Rika Hiro is an associate curator of Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She co-curated Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950–1970 and Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art, 1968–1988 at the Getty Research Institute. Her publications include “Bruce Yonemoto: Made in Occupied Japan” in Review of Japanese Culture and Society 32 (2020), “Jam & Butter: Paper Gallery: Mori’s Form, Artists’ Magazines, toward a Site for West Coast-Kansai Exchanges” in The Bulletin of Graphic Culture Research Grants (2023), and the chapter “Transposing the Undocumented: Nihonjin no Kiroku/Records of the Japanese (1959)” in Transposed Memory: Visual Sites of National Recollection in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century East Asia (BRILL, forthcoming summer 2024).

Yasufumi Nakamori is director of the museum and vice president of arts and culture at Asia Society, New York. Nakamori came to Asia Society from Tate, where, from 2018 to 2023, he served as senior curator, international art (photography), where he led the development of Tate’s collection of photography as well as the strategy for representing photography in the program at Tate Modern. He curated the exhibition Zanele Muholi (2020–21), among others, and advised on Asian and Asian diaspora art in programming, including for the exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind (2024).

Gabriel Ritter is director of the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and associate professor in the department of the history of art and architecture. Ritter holds a doctorate in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also earned his Master’s in art history. Academically, Ritter specializes in avant-garde visual art practices of modern and contemporary Japan, for the past decade he has been a curator of contemporary art within a collecting, encyclopedic museum context at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art, where he was responsible for growing and diversifying the permanent collections, with increased focus on female artists, artists of color, and those who openly identify as LGBTQI+. In 2015 he served as the co-organizing curator for the exhibition Between Action and the Unknown: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Sadamasa Motonaga at the Dallas Museum of Art and editor of the accompanying scholarly catalogue.

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