Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod’s Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls is a composition of seventy five flowers made of mulberry and yerba buena fibers, embroidered, printed and formed into a hanging mobile installation. This installation is a tribute to Lydia's family history, the diasporic story of a Japanese family who has endured the sorrows of forced migration for over three generations. Each flower petal contains fragments of their memories, and carries within the symbolic healing Lydia experienced through the process of creating the materials by the imprint of the embroidered textures.
About Lydia Nakashima Degarrod
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Ph.D. was born in Chile and grew up in a Japanese-Chilean family. She is both a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who creates installations that blur the line between ethnography and art to convey experiences of extraordinary na１ture and address issues of social justice. She is guided by the notion that ethnographies and visual art are both means of illuminating, communicating, and feeling our presence in the world.
She has received numerous awards and grants for her artwork including the International Contemporary Craft Competition & Exhibition, the Wing Luke Memorial Museum, California Story Fund, California Council for the Humanities, the International Award for Excellence in the Area of Art, International Journal of the Arts in Society, and the Chilean Government Sponsorship, Ministry of Culture, Chile. As a scholar, she has received grants from Fulbright, Tinker Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Council for the Humanities. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia and Harvard University.
Lydia has exhibited her work at the Monterey Museum of Art, de Young Museum of Art, David Rockefeller Center at Harvard University, Oliver Art Center at the California College of the Arts (CCA), and the Francisco Pratt Puig Cultural Center in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. Her work, Mending the Past, is currently in a five-year national tour as part of the traveling exhibit Resilience: A Sansei Sense of Legacy. Lydia has been an Artist in Residence at the De Young, Center for Art and Public Life at CCA, Djerassi Artists Program, Kala Art Institute, the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology at Virginia Tech, the Women’s International Study Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She teaches at the California College of the Arts where she serves as the co-director of the Centre for Aesthetics and Politics.