The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 160

ARTISTS' BIOGRAPHIES

Takamori, Akio
Japanese; (b. 1950, Nobeoka, Miyazaki, Japan; lives in Seattle, WA)
1978 MFA New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred University, Alfred, NY
1976 BFA Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO
1969–1971 Musashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan

Akio Takamori was born in Nobeoka, in Miyazaki prefecture, on the island of Kyushu, Japan.
He attended the Musashino Art University in Tokyo and apprenticed with Mingei pottery master
Kumao Oota from 1972 to 1974 at which point he met American ceramicist Ken Ferguson who

Clark, Garth, and Cindi Strauss.
Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary

invited Takamori to study with him at the Kansas City Art Institute. After completing his BFA,

Ceramics: The Garth Clark & Mark

Takamori earned his MFA at Alfred University in New York where he studied with Tony Hepburn

Del Vecchio Collection. New Haven:

and Wayne Higby. Shortly thereafter he worked as a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation

Yale University Press; Houston: The

in Helena, Montana, before moving to Seattle, in 1993 to take a faculty position in the department
of ceramics at the University of Washington. Growing up in postwar Japan, Takamori’s navigated
an amalgam of cultural influences. Throughout his work the artist explores the intersections
between Eastern and Western aesthetics. Much of Takamori’s oeuvre to date is figurative. His
early vessels of the 1980s and 1990s were mini-erotic narratives. The drawn figures were
stylistically similar to Pica