Keiko Hara
Keiko Hara was born in Japan in 1942. After studying in Japan at Gendai Art School, Tokyo, and Oita-Kenritsu Art College, Oita, Hara earned her BFA Degree in painting at Mississippi University for Women, Columbus, Mississippi. In 1983 she was granted United States permanent resident status as an artist. Hara also earned graduate degrees in printmaking: an MS at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Hara currently lives and works in Walla Walla, Washington where she is a professor of art at Whitman College.
Early in March 1995, Hara went to Japan with two students to work in the studio and home of master printer Tadashi Toda. (Over the past twenty years Mr. Toda has made woodblock prints with an impressive list of American artists including Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thibaud, Helen Frankenthaler, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, and Alex Katz.) Mr. Toda’s studio is located in a snowy mountain village outside of Kyoto. There, wooden buildings with clay frames and straw roofs have been preserved as an example of a traditional 18th century farming community.
Mr. Toda learned and mastered the traditional Ukiyo-E woodblock technique from his father. In this austere and inspiring setting, the artist and her students spent ten days intensely proofing and working with the master woodblock printer. The results are four distinctive abstract compositions, some with calligraphic marks, collage, and stencil.
With over thirteen one-person exhibitions to her credit since 1976 (North America & Europe), Hara has also been included in numerous invitational group exhibitions throughout the United States. Among museums that include Hara’s work in their permanent collections are the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Charles A. Wustum Museum, WI, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Muskegon Art Museum, MI. Corporate collections representing Hara’s work include IBM Corporation and Marshall Field & Co., Chicago IL, Cray Research Co. and the St. Paul Company, MN, the Council House–Johnson Wax Co., Racine, WI and Sony Co., Washington, D.C.
Hara has been awarded grants from the Washington State Centennial Commission of Washington/Pacific Cultural Connections at Centrium (1989), and Artpark, NY (1983), and the AKP Teaching Fellowship (1987). In 1984 she won the Philadelphia Print Exhibition Selection Award and in 1976 the first prize in the Michigan Print & Drawing Exhibition, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI. Hara has been active lecturing and leading printmaking workshops in the United States and Japan over the past two decades. She has also curated a number of exhibitions including the 1984 traveling exhibition, Current Japanese Printmakers and the 1997 exhibition Water, Ink, Paper at Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA.