Nishiki Sugawara-Beda
Nishiki Sugawara-Beda is a Japan-born, Japanese-American visual artist. Through her art, she seeks to find the core of shared humanity, connecting across space and time. To do this, she centers traditional artistic methods from multiple cultures and foregrounds the origins of materials in her artworks.
For many years, Sugawara-Beda researched and used Sumi ink in her works—a material traditionally used in East Asia for writing and drawing, made from soot and animal glue. She has made her own Sumi by collecting organic materials to burn into soot from various locations across the world. The resulting paintings, a series called KuroKuroShiro, act as a stage for the fusing together of this traditional Japanese craft and matter sourced from specific places that she has been drawn to over the course of her life
KuroKuroShiro, meaning black-black-white in Japanese, uses landscape as a conceptual framework for the interior world—a sublime space where we might all connect. KuroKuroShiro+, welcomes the materials from a specific place to take a significant role, including the state where she calls home, Texas.
She holds an MFA in Painting from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and exhibits her work in solo and group exhibitions, and lectures nationwide and abroad. Her works are in private and public collections including the Dallas Museum of Art (TX) and the Dennos Museum (MI). Currently, she is an Associate Professor and Cox Family Endowed Professor of Painting and Drawing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.