Hidemi Takagi

Visual Description: Hanging from the ceiling are eleven photographs of multi-racial teenagers, each dressed in a piece of clothing or with incorporated items from their cultures. The photographs have vibrant colors. A QR code brings us to documents with interviews with the teenagers about their mixed-race identity.

Curatorial Description: IDENTITIES is a photography + interview project started with my family, a blend of Japanese and Haitian ancestry during pandemic, and quickly expanded to portraying other biracial/multiracial subjects. I seek to envision deep roots and explore issues of mixed-race identities.

I have been working with biracial/multiracial teenagers for IDENTITIES with their parents’ consent. I take their portraits, interview them, ask questions about how they feel about being mixed-race, their experience and dream. I chose to work with this age group because teens today are more politically engaged, and they are our future. I had worked with kids who lived mainly in New York, and additionally, New Jersey, Florida, Minnesota, and Japan so far. I am creating complex and whimsically self-costuming images of mixed-race life, its public and private faces, using my art as a tool to explore racial identity, race relations, public presentation of the self, and cultural norms.

This is a collaboration project with mixed-race teenagers and their families. Since kids are underage, I ask their parents to get involved in the process of preparing the photoshoot. I spent one month discussing how to take pictures before the photoshoot. I request the subjects to wear at least one item that represents their ethnic cultures. After the photoshoot, I interviewed them about their identities.

Americans tend to divide, separate, segregate and categorize people based primarily on the color of skin. The number of people who self-identify as biracial/multiracial is growing faster than any single race across the U.S. While race, racism and gender identity are hot topics, biracial/multiracial people will continue to be a source of curiosity. People in America rarely discuss the issue of mixed-race people’s identities. Nowadays, we often see mixed-race people in magazines, TV, and ads on streaming services and on billboards, and such looks are becoming mainstream in fashion/music industries. But biracial/multiracial people remain as a minority group in our society with complex public and internal pressures concerning self- presentations: they often are not encouraged to embrace the duality of their heritage.

Through the process of creating IDENTITIES, I search to visualize biracial/multiracial people’s roots and the cultural tendrils that have grown and intertwined from them, and address the issues of mixed-race identity, racism, and immigration in America and other countries.

IDENTITIES Interviews

About

Hidemi Takagi (b. in Kyoto, Japan and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY) exhibited both nationally and internationally (London, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris). Her notable selected exhibitions include the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, BRIC Media Art Center, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Takagi was awarded: The AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2004), the NYFA IAP Mentoring Program (2008), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Artist Studio Residency (2010), the Engaging Artist residency by More Art (2015), BRIC’s New Media Art Fellowship (2016), Utopian Practice Fellowship by Culture Push (2017), En Foco Photography Fellowship (2018), KODA Artist Residency: Identity + Justice (2020); The Sustainable Arts Fellowship by Gallery Aferro (2022), The Bandung 2022 Residency by MoCADA & The Asian American Arts Alliance (2022): Paradise AIR, Artist residency: Japan (2022) Chiba, Japan, The Puffin Foundation Fellowship (2022 & 2024), The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement Grant (2022) and NYSCA FY2024 grant by the New York State Council on the Arts (2024). Her work has been reviewed in Time Out Tel Aviv, Time Out New York, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. Her Blender project was selected for the Times Square Public Arts Program of the Times Square Alliance 2011