Keiko Hara

Keiko Hara was born in 1942 in North Korea to Japanese parents and moved to Japan with her family in 1945. She studied painting and drawing at the Gendai Art School in Tokyo in 1964 and painting at Oita-Kenritsu Art College in Oita in 1966. In 1971 she moved to the United States, where she completed a B.F.A. in painting at Mississippi State University for Women in 1974, an M.A. in printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1975 and an M.F.A. in printmaking at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1976, the year she won first prize in the Michigan Print and Drawing Exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She was granted permanent U.S. resident status as an artist in 1983.

Hara taught at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, from 1978 to 1980 and at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls from 1980 to 1985 before joining Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she taught from 1985 to 2006. She has held research teaching fellowships with the Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University in Kyoto in 1987 and 2011, and in 2015 she co-founded the Whitman College Mokuhanga Center, following a Mokuhanga Innovative Artist-in-Residence award in Tokyo in 2012. She has presented papers and workshops at International Mokuhanga Conferences in Hawaii and served as a panelist at the SGCI conference in Portland in 2016.

Her practice explores themes of place, memory and cultural intersection through abstract compositions in mixed media, painting, installation, glass and mokuhanga woodblock printing. Since the early 1990s her exhibitions have carried the recurring titles Topophilia and Verse, and more recently Ma and Ki, in installations and works on paper and canvas. She has had solo exhibitions at Perimeter Gallery in Chicago since 1982, at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, Cohju Contemporary Art in Kyoto and the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University presented Keiko Hara: Four Decades of Paintings and Prints in 2022 and 2023.

Hara's awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2005, an Artist Trust Fellowship in 1994, residencies at Artpark, Centrum and the Pilchuck Glass School, and public art commissions from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, the Washington State Arts Commission and the King County Art Commission. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Art in Racine, among many other public and corporate collections. She has shown with the Aldo Castillo Gallery since 2018.