“I felt the need to talk about traditions in my work, specifically how objects hold memories that we need to revisit from time to time to remember who we are and where we came from,” Barboza recently told ARTnews.

Born in Lima and currently based in Lobitos, Peru, Barboza began her career as a fashion designer as a way to support her art-making, which initially was photography based. In addition to embracing a new medium, her mother’s death prompted Barboza to create work that reflected on the social, political, and environmental nuances of Lima, with an eye toward exploring the city’s centuries-old herbal traditions.

For her latest solo show, “In a State of Latency” at Nunu Fine Art in New York (through January 6), Barboza is debuting towering tapestries that incorporate photography, patchwork, embroidery, her experiments using natural dyes, and plants she found during inclement weather to reflect on how climate changed has transformed a Peruvian forest into a desert.

“While I acknowledge that art may not single-handedly change the world,” Nunu Fine Art founder Nunu Hung said, “I believe in its potential to contribute by fostering awareness and motivation among individuals who have the capacity to effect change.”

Peru has a long history of weaving, extending as far back as 10,000 years ago with the processing of plant fibers like reed or totora and cotton coming some 5,000 years ago, according to Barboza. Numerous Indigenous communities have safeguarded traditional weaving techniques despite colonization and its aftereffects. Barboza’s decision to use plant-dyed fibers, as opposed to synthetic ones, reflects her commitment not only to environmental awareness but also to the preservation of traditional textile practices. According to Barboza, who is not Indigenous but has spent time learning about different herbal practices throughout Peru, plant dyes reveal the country’s distinctive geography and biodiverse ecosystems as well as centuries of Indigenous knowledge and traditions.

“As I did more research about the origin of textiles, I felt more like a foreigner in my own country,” Barboza said. “Engaging with communities that maintain these traditions is time-consuming but valuable. Oftentimes, the research took a longer time than actually working on an artwork.”

One such work is Emerging Stone (2023), an embroidery of a somewhat abstract sphere in various colors. The work was made using different colors of sheep threads dyed with native plants that thrive during the summer storms, which are identified in a chart below the spherical shape.

Elsewhere, the artist has created a set of textile maps with photographs she took during the rainy season. Barboza collected information about the weather, tides, and storms in order to understand the changes she saw in the landscape each day. She then verified the data by being present, waiting for what the landscape would reveal, which informed how she created these works.

In Between Two Streams (2023), Barboza sandwiches her embroidery around a photograph of a person diving into the ocean; the photo divides the tapestry in two: a mostly blue section that mirrors the ocean’s hues and the other reflecting the palette of a barren desert. Long threads overrun the embroidery, hanging loosely from a wooden stick, evoking a sense of infinite growth.

Barboza’s tapestries are typically displayed this way, without frames, the loose threads spilling out forth—an apt metaphor for how the forces of nature are able to shape our environments beyond our control. “Nature is in a constant state of change, and so too are my artworks,” she said. In Folds in the Desert (2023), Barboza takes this approach further: a stretch of fabric that has been mostly dyed with beige-colored mud hangs from the ceiling, descending onto a tree branch, until it cascades onto the floor. The tapestry looks like a rough-hewn desertscape, with the white fabric’s negative space resembling an intricately carved engraving on wood.

Artworks like Between Air and Sea (2023), Machu Picchu montaña (2022), and Pleamar 10:36 am (2023) depict drastic changes in weather like warming of the Pacific Ocean, and bodies of water in general. The compositions are inspired by the El Niño phenomenon, during which Barboza witnessed the drastic climate changes in the forest, the waves, and the beach.

A recurring scene in Barboza’s embroidery is one she can’t shake from her mind: intense rainfall activating desert once dry waterways. The resulting torrents, coupled with powerful landslides and waterslides, forcefully descended into the sea, sweeping away everything in their path. Once the rain stopped, the sea reclaimed the shoreline, inching ever closer and eroding the sandy expanse that was once there.

“Weaving these images is akin to imparting corporeality to this information, creating a record of time and the body’s motion in each woven weft,” Barboza said. “It serves as a means to translate information that is only validated through continuous observation of a place. As the environment transformed, my body became attuned to it.” In a world deeply entwined with the repercussions of climate change, Barboza’s art serves as a poignant reflection on the delicate yet robust nature of our ecosystems. Through her distinctive fusion of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary expression, she invites viewers to explore their connection with the environment. Her work prompts a profound question: Are we molding the environment, or is it shaping us in ways we have yet to fully grasp?

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Born Earle Goodenow, Kyohei Inukai (1913–1985) was the third son of established portrait painter Kyohei Inukai the Elder and sculptor Lucene Goodenow. When his father died, Earle Goodenow became Kyohei Inukai as a way to honor him.

Though he remained largely unknown as an artist during his lifetime, Inukai produced more than 2,000 artworks over the course of his five-decade career. Among the few showings of his art he had during his lifetime were two in 1970, at the year’s World Exposition in Osaka and the Brooklyn Museum, both in print exhibitions. To support his family, Inukai worked full-time as an art director at McCann Erickson during the day, producing art at night into the early morning. They ranged from abstract oil paintings and sumi-e (ink) paintings to silkscreens composed of bold colors and geometric shapes to even sculptures and children’s books.

But interest in Inukai’s work is slowly changing, nearly 40 years after his death, with his first institutional solo exhibition currently on view at the Japan Society in New York, through June 25. Curated by Tiffany Lambert, the Japan Society Gallery’s interim director, the show features over 100 works by the artist, dating from the late 1960s through 1985, the year of his death, showing the range of Inukai’s experimentation in style and technique, all the while incorporating and grappling with his Japanese heritage.

“You see American abstraction, Pop art, Op art as influences in his silkscreen prints,” Lambert said in an interview, “and then you also see the washi [handmade paper], the use of sumi-e (ink painting) as a pathway to abstraction in his work. For me, I see that he’s trying to find his own way to visualize some of those artistic and cultural traditions in his life.”

That journey of understanding his cultural identity filtered through various art historical influences is reflected in the show’s exhibition design. “We divided the galleries into two distinct zones: one light, airy, and approachable, the other dark, quiet, and reflective. Each space is intended to emphasize the particular nature of the work,” exhibition designers Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, of the New York–based firm Antenna Design, told ARTnews.

In the first gallery, Inukai’s playful silkscreen prints are filled with vibrant colors, shapes, and lines. In one untitled painting from 1978, a parabola made of deep red as it changes to orange is set against various contrasting blocks of blue with a red dot at its center. The overall effect is mesmerizing. Surrounding that work, several works on papers, framed in light wood, lean against custom-built shelves, in the same light wood.

A second smaller gallery acts as a transition from those colorful abstractions to the moodier ones he made later, displaying here Inukai’s initial experiment with sumi-e ink calligraphy. In Spiro Flower 2 (1978), Inukai pairs a shape of swirling circles formed into a triangle with what appear to be two characters written in calligraphy. They are not, however, any characters legible in Japanese.

“There’s actually no language written there that’s legible,” Lambert said. “From what we know, Inukai didn’t speak any Japanese.” She added that the swirling shapes could be interpreted as a family crest or even “conjure the knots on packaging and the obi belts of the kimono.”

Inukai had once explained the work’s meaning to his stepdaughter Maggie Hannan but the exact details have now been lost to memory. But even more than their exact meaning, the pieces represent Inukai’s overall approach to his art-making, which over the decades was still indebted to seeing the landscapes of Japan for the first time during that fateful visit in 1954. “Kyohei just loved the juxtaposition of the old and new,” she said. “When my friends used to visit, all of them were floored by his limitless abilities to express himself through art.”

The exhibition then takes a dramatic change in tone upon entering the third and final gallery, where Inukai’s sumi-e ink paintings are shown in a dimmed Zen “rock garden” that mirror the stone-shaped patterns he expressed in ink on handmade paper. Inukai’s longing to connect with his cultural roots through his art is further underscored through the symbolism of stones like this, called suiseki, in Japanese culture, which has been appreciated for their aesthetics since the 7th century.

“The sumi-e works in the final gallery made us think of something grounded and eternal, so we transformed the space into a ‘rock garden’ where visitors can sit on the benches, slow down, and contemplate what they see,” Udagawa and Moeslinger, the exhibition designers, said.

The importance of his Japanese ancestry extended beyond Inukai’s art-making, too. Though his father was professionally ostracized after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Inukai instilled in his children a sense of pride in their Japanese heritage; he would often wear a kimono at home and was an expert cook in Japanese cuisine.

In addition to being a prolific artist, Inukai was also an empathetic author, penning several children’s books, like The Peevish Penguin (1955) or The Owl Who Hated the Dark (1969), all of which tell of how the titular character learned to accept their differences as strengths. Inukai’s daughter Ariane Tallman recalled, “I was made fun of due to my looks when I was in school, and daddy reassured me that I need to be proud of the fact that I was different.”

New York–based Japanese artist Natsuki Takauji said that in Inukai’s art, she sees the tendrils of generational trauma that the Inukai family experienced during World War II as Japanese Americans. 

“I think the Japanese haven’t talked enough about what happened to them after Pearl Harbor and how it changed their lives and perspectives,” said Takauji. “This damage exists subtly in Inukai’s work. I felt his strong intention to commit to his roots as an artist despite an unpromising career. I was moved by his sincerity to seek and recuperate; the result seems so striking after decades.”

She often thinks about what it might have been like if she told the shop owner that she was Korean, despite having, in her own words, “invisible Asian traits in the Black body.” When she first went to a Korean beauty store in the U.S., she said shop owners would follow her around. “At first, they’d check my bag, but after I finally tell them that I’m Korean, they give me tons of free samples and don’t follow me around anymore,” Davenport said in a recent interview.

Born in Virginia, Davenport moved to Korea with her family when she was 5 years old. (She moved back Stateside when she was 17.) Her mother is Korean, and her father is a Black American, who was working for the U.S. government in South Korea. Throughout her life she has experienced microaggressions regarding her family, such as “Oh, you are such a good mix,” she recalled.

Dana Davenport.

Davenport’s lived experiences, in particular those at Korean beauty stores, have inspired the 28-year-old artist to create art that looks to merge her identities as a Black woman and an Asian woman. Using synthetic hair and welded-steel bases, Davenport forms braid chandeliers to which she adds Korean characters as adornments.

Based on a recent study that over 70 percent of beauty stores that sell Black hair care products are owned by Korean Americans, and that many Black hair products are produced in Korea, Davenport has created artwork that explores Black-Asian relations in the U.S. “As a product overwhelmingly sold by Koreans to Black Americans, Black hair care and beauty supply stores have often served as both the site and object of tensions between Black and Korean communities and a marker of the white supremacist agenda to divide us,” she said.

It takes Davenport between three and four months to create one of her braid chandeliers, which she works on one at a time. She first sketches out the chandelier design and then creates the steel skeleton. Due to the scarcity of the pre-braided synthetic hair, she often uses what’s readily available on the market in her sculptures. Davenport said most people go to hair salons to get their crochet braids done directly onto their scalps, so there aren’t many suppliers currently offering pre-braided synthetic hair in a wide range of colors. In one braid chandelier piece, titled 여름 훈녀 (yeoleum hunnyeo), which translates to “hot girl summer,” she dyed blond braids into a brown tone to reflect her skin color.

Dana Davenport, Box Braid Chandelier #4, 여름 훈녀 (yeoleum hunnyeo)-Hot Girl Summer, 2021.

Though color choice is not a priority in Davenport’s chandelier sculptures, she is always looking for ways to express her understanding of the color red. For the third chandelier piece created as part of the series, she deliberately used black and red synthetic hair; hanging below are clay characters for 블랙파워 (beullaegpawo), which translates to “Black Power.” She says the color red holds varying meanings among different cultures, so she wanted to create a tension in this piece.

“Red is a powerful color,” Davenport said. “Professors usually grade exams in red. Red also has a negative connotation in Asian superstition, in which when you write your names in red, it will bring bad luck. To me, red is a color that demands attention. While the hot girl summer piece is playful, this piece carries a heavier feeling where it discusses the power structure in Asian and Black cultures.”

​​When it comes to texts, Davenport says that she chose the text based on English to Korean translations that she either finds interesting or humorous in some ways. There are some words in Korean that are difficult to express in English. In a recent piece, she used blue and black synthetic hair and silver beads to create a lantern-shaped chandelier. Hanging below is the character 한 (han), which directly translates to “Han river that goes through Seoul” but refers to the collective grief and resentment Koreans carry toward inequality in social classes. Davenport says there is no English expression reflecting the nuanced meaning of “han.”

Dana Davenport, Box Braid Chandelier #5, 한 (han)-collective grief and resentment we carry because of oppression, 2022.

Davenport’s inspiration for Box Braid Chandelier #5 came from her fascination with lighting stores, as there aren’t many spaces where chandeliers and other fixtures hang from the ceiling in abundance. “When I think about hanging chandeliers in spaces,” she said, “I think about the way that they command a room and set the tone for what that room is. There’s a level of protection that I feel when they’re hanging above me. Because of the messaging in the materials that I used, I want to find a material that can serve as a proxy for my Black body, and so that’s how I landed on synthetic hair.”

She continued, “I’ve been thinking about the tensions between Black and Asian people in terms of my art career for the whole time. I think why these tensions live on so easily is that American society [has] branded Asian people and Black people as opposites. My artwork became an outlet for me to express these hard feelings.”

Last fall, Davenport showcased her box braid chandelier artwork in a pop-up Black-hair care beauty supply shop located at Recess, a residency program and exhibition space in Brooklyn.

“Watching the gallery space transform into a Black-owned beauty supply shop proved to be more emotional than I had anticipated,” said Alexa Smithwrick, Recess’s communications coordinator who worked with Davenport to help realize the project. “Dana’s Beauty Supply somehow captures and bottles all of the Black magic, intimacy, and self-actualization that takes place in Beauty supply shops all across America.”

Installation view of “Dana’s Beauty Supply,” 2021, at Recess, New York.

Growing up in South Korea, Davenport spent her childhood figuring out her racial identity in a country where many people didn’t perceive her as Korean because of her dark skin complexion. She remembered her mom always reminding her to “dress well and put makeup on.”

“When I was in Korea, my mom made my sister and I dress nicely to lessen the amount of discrimination we would face,” she said. “She said if Korean kids are outside wearing sweatpants, people think they’re just kids and they just want to be comfortable. But if you’re Black and you dress comfortably outside, people think you are poor and can’t afford nice clothes.”

When Davenport was in high school in Korea, her prom date’s mom said they should not go to prom together because Davenport is Black. “It was crazy that he even told me that,” she said. “If my family had said something like that, I would be so ashamed of it, and I would never tell anybody. But he told me in a way that was just a joke, and that’s so racist.”

An archival portrait of Dana Davenport and her family, installed in “Dana’s Beauty Supply,” 2021, at Recess, New York.

Davenport said that anti-Black sentiments in Asian communities are still severe in both countries. As a child, she believed that America would be a “dreamland,” but when she moved back at 17, she soon realized that that fantasy did not match the reality she found. “Being perceived as Black in Korea is different from being perceived as Black in the States,” she said. “In Korea, I was hyper-visible and people were always looking at me. I just felt like I stuck out a lot. In the States, no one cares. I was invisible in some ways, but also hyper-visible in terms of policing.”

In her work, Davenport looks to examine the tensions that continue to exist between Black American and Asian American communities. She drew a connection between the 1991 killing of 15-year-old African American girl Latasha Harlins by a Korean American convenience store owner and how the news media has perpetuated the idea that anti-Asian attacks, especially those since the onset of the pandemic, are committed mostly by Black people.

Performance views of Dana Davenport’s Rice Performance #1: 200 Pounds of Rice, 2016.

One work that Davenport said is of particular importance to her is her 2016 performance, 200 Pounds of Rice. Staged at Korean-owned gallery K&P in Chelsea, the artist, who was naked, picked up a bag of rice that had the Korean characters 흑인 (black person) written in red and carried it around the gallery, until she finally poured its contents out in a corner. All the while audio of Davenport’s mother speaking about the racism she faced in Korea played. Davenport spent her childhood figuring out her racial identity in a country where many people didn’t perceive her as Korean because of her dark skin complexion. She remembered her mom always reminding her to “dress well and put makeup on.”

While Davenport was playing her mom’s audio for me during a studio visit, she sat there in silence. She clenched her hands whenever her mom would sigh.

“As I was doing this piece, I was more focused on what my mom’s experience was like,” she said. “Something I didn’t really think too intimately about when I was a kid. Although she’s not Black, being a mother to Black kids and wanting to shield us as much as she can is the weight I want to share with her.”

Dana Davenport, Box Braid Chandelier #3, 블랙파워 (beullaegpawo)-Black Power, 2021.

Davenport says creating chandelier sculptures is a way for her to take a break from art performance that involves using her body. In the past, she said she felt that she was not protecting her own body during her performance work, so she turned to synthetic hair, a material that she resonated with for comfort.

But looking to the future, Davenport said she will return to creating performance art, while also exploring new ways to create more braid sculptures that will become more complex as she continues to add different beauty supply objects to them. They’ll likely feature in future live performances.

Davenport wants to use her art to engage in more conversation about the ways in which white supremacy benefits from the minority conflict between Blacks and Asians. Over the summer, she launched a scholarship to support people in the Black community that are pursuing an education in cosmetology. She added, “There are still so many things that need to be done.”