Florida Art Shows- Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at Orlando Museum of Art

Akiko Kotani’s Red Falls was part of Skyway 20/21 at USF Contemporary Museum, but it was a joy to see it again along with the 2023 sculptures White Falls and Neon Forest.

The museum’s information on the artist and her work-

As a young aspiring artist living in New York, Akiko Kotani discovered the expressive power of textile art while taking a weaving class at the YMCA Manhattan Weaving Workshop. The experience was life changing, leading her to continue her studies in Guatemala, a country with an exceptional textile art tradition. After two years in Guatemala, she returned to the United States to complete her MA in textiles at the Tyler School of Art in 1977.

In 1977 textiles were only beginning to achieve the status as an art form that they currently have in the contemporary art world. At the time the medium was widely associated with traditional and domestic crafts or as part of the fashion and décor industries. That view was starting to change, as demonstrated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s acquisition of one of Kotani’s works shortly after her graduation from Tyler. Since then, she has had a distinguished career as an artist exploring a variety of textile practices.

Kotani had been searching for ways to expand the scale of her work when in 2011 she received a grant from the Heinz Endowments and Pittsburgh Foundation which enabled her to pursue that ambition. The result was her first monumentally scaled sculpture, Soft Walls, a precursor of the works seen in the Florida Prize exhibition. Kotani has always used simple and direct methods of weaving and stitching to create her works. For Soft Walls she adopted a loosely woven crochet technique to produce long bands of material cut from white plastic garbage bags. Those bands were then combined to cover large free-standing walls. Kotani’s massive blocks of woven plastic have the elegant simplicity of minimalist sculpture, while the irregular knotting and soft, slumping fabric undermine the austere formalism of the work’s rectilinear shape.

Kotani’s process of crocheting plastic bags and other materials into long bands is an innovative development that has allowed her to create a variety of large-scale sculptural forms. White Falls and Neon Forest use these crocheted bands, draped in different ways to make sophisticated minimalist statements. Both sets of works are made livelier by how they respond to light. The thin plastic of White Falls shimmers like cascading water. The three fifteen-foot-high conical hangings of Neon Forest are a vibrant satin fabric with a sheen that sparkles in light.

Red Falls is a more ominous work. It is designed to come out of a corner, perhaps suggesting a crevice in a cliff or even an open wound. Made with red plastic bags used by hospitals for biological waste, Red Falls expresses Kotani’s concern for the plight of physically abused women. In fact, all Kotani’s work is in some way an expression of her concerns for women. Her use of textiles and the repetitive practice of weaving pays homage to the extraordinary achievements of women throughout history which have typically been undervalued by society.