Riffe Gallery Installation, Columbus,Ohio, 1994

Artist Biography: Masumi Hayashi

Masumi Hayashi is an artist whose photographs and installations have gained attention in the United States, Europe and Japan. Her work has been exhibited and represented in many respected museums and galleries, including the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tokyo Museum of Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art, London, England. Ms. Hayashi is a Professor in the Art Department at Cleveland State University .

Professor Hayashi has awarded the 1994 Cleveland Visual Arts Award. She has received from the Ohio Arts Council artist fellowships and a project grant, the national Edowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest fellowship, a Florida Arts Council fellowship grant, and faculty research grants from Cleveland State University, and a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund research grant.

Her photographs have been published in magazines such as DoubleTake (fall 1997), Aperture (Beyond Wilderness), See (issue 1:1), and Mother Jones (April 1995).

The series "American Concentration Camps" brings focus to the American internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, from 1942 to 1945. This chapter of American history is examined in a series of Hayashi's panoramic photo collages of the camp sites and has expanded to include some of the sites of the Japanese Canadian internment. She has collected interviews from camp internees and these voices have add a collective memory to these desolate landscape photographs.

This is a personal body of work for the artist, since she was born in the Gila River Relocation camp in Arizona in 1945. Other series of work using her panoramic photo collages include the "post industrial sites" in the Midwest,(1986-1991), "E.P.A .Superfund Sites" (1989-1993), abandoned "prisons series" (1987-1996), and "CityWorks" (1987-1994). We will continue to update this website with other of Ms. Hayashi's projects with a more representative retrospective. At present, some of Masumi Hayshi's Prison Series is spotlighted in the on-line magazine, XConnect (May 1997 issue)published by the University of Phillidelphia, and the Cleveland State University Art Department faculty website.