Natalia Nakazawa

January 27, 2026

Natalia Nakazawa (b. 1982, Charlotte, NC) is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist and educator working in painting, textiles, and social practice. Natalia received her MFA in studio practice from California College of the Arts, a MSEd from Queens College, and a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has recently been exhibited at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Arlington Arts Center (Washington, DC), Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), The Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Lafayette College Galleries (Easton, PA), and The Old Stone House in Brooklyn (NY). Natalia has been an artist in residence at The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, MASS MoCA, SPACE on Ryder, Wassaic Project, Facebook AIR, Interlude Artist Residency, CAMPO Garzon, Triangle Arts Association, and Wave Hill Winter Workspace.

Can you introduce yourself and your practice?

I’m an artist who works across painting, textiles, and social practice. I work in a very engaged way with many different groups of people, and teaching is a core part of my practice. Arts administration and organizing are also part of what I do. My practice is very multifaceted, and I care deeply about creating intergenerational spaces where different groups of people can come together to share stories, talk about their histories, and collectively imagine the futures we want.

This happens by being present and having conversations that many other spaces don’t facilitate. These are conversations that can be difficult to have in schools or even at home. Through two or three-dimensional work and through creating spaces for gathering, I try to open conversations around identity, belonging, collectivism, and collective action.

That’s what I hope my work does across different mediums, to reach different types of people and attention spans—and really meet different audiences where they are.

You engage deeply with artists, students, and institutions. You’re a professor, you work on boards, and you also run different art programs. How do these different roles feed back into your practice?

I think about this a lot. I came from a more traditional arts background—I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. It was a wonderful education, but it very much focused on a studio-based practice, something that was realized through tangible objects and through the sort of trafficking of these objects. Over time, I realized my practice is much more expansive. It’s informed by political systems, education systems, and systems of collective action. Becoming a parent also informed how I operate in the world, how I find and create space in the world.

Through conversations with other artists and friends, I started to see my work as part of a much bigger picture. I now think of my practice as research-driven. I have big questions, and I use art as a vehicle to pose those questions to the world, listen for responses, and build something from that exchange. It’s a call-and-response process. Being an artist, educator, arts administrator, parent, and working in collectives aren’t like separate things, but they all feed and inform a unified vision on how to move through space.

I’m grateful for all this training because when I’m trying to solve a problem in a project, I can draw from many different skill sets and experiences. It’s allowed me to work in a multifaceted way, and that’s been incredibly important for my practice.

We’ve talked personally about how you bring your children into art spaces and how you push those boundaries. And that opens up doors for so many other artists to do the same as well. I find that to be a reflection of what you’re doing with your practice.

That’s very intentional. I’m a mixed-race, multicultural person, and there are constant attempts to define people through rigid categories, like gender, nationality, and identity. I believe the role of the artist is to push back against those boundaries and to demand more.

Because of my training as an arts administrator and educator, I also understand systems and how to work within them to create change. In a recent exhibition curated by Klaudia Ofwona Draber, we talked a lot about this: How do we expand definitions of what it means to be human, and try to push back against these very regressive and dangerous forms of definitions? So I’m always asking: How can we want more for ourselves? How can we demand more? And how can the art world respond? I think people want to meet us there, but it requires compassion and patience, without backing down.

That applies to mothering, education, and art-making. These are rigorous practices. I do take it upon myself to say, how can we encourage each other to keep meeting the day and being fearless, especially at this particular moment?

Can you talk about Our Stories of Migration? How did the project begin, and how has it evolved?

I have been evolving and iterating this socially engaged project since 2017, when Executive Order 13769 (named “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry to the United States”) was issued, banning travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries and suspending Syrian refugee resettlement. This horrific executive order created a cascade of uncertainty and hostility felt swiftly in our NYC communities. Our Stories of Migration began with a collaboration involving middle school students from MS51 and the historic, neighborhood-based museum, The Old Stone House in Brooklyn.

This project created a space to respond to the order and the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment by recording familial stories, animating maps of past and future paths, and embroidering these journeys onto a collective textile map. The resulting exhibition, Multilocational, saw active community participation from parents and students and later expanded to new venues, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Journeys: World Culture Festival and the Dedalus Foundation, Abrons Art Center, Museum of Arts and Design, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

Our Stories of Migration details human movement through art objects and storytelling. Participants are invited to embroider their own ancestral, present, and future paths onto the surface of a world map tapestry, which has been constructed with digital images mined from the site-specific museum collections. Each image highlights a different object from the collection that embodies historical moments of cultural exchange. Whether these exchanges take the form of material goods gathered from a trade route or culturally specific images taking on a new meaning in a different land, Our Stories of Migration encourages critical engagement through personal and cultural histories. Additionally, visitors draw their own maps, which are continuously added to an animated archive – and write responses to the prompt question: “What does it mean to be a global citizen?”

You’ve talked about the absence of hierarchy between mediums. It feels like the conversations themselves are part of the work. How does materiality factor into your practice?

I think you pointed out something that I hadn’t even thought about, but primacy to engagement or to access is really important to me. When I choose materials, I’m always thinking about how this can really catch somebody’s attention. How can this meet all types of attention spans? What I’m really interested in is drawing people in so that we can have the discourse, because if they’re not engaged with the work, I don’t feel like there’s much I can do.

For example, at Mass MoCA, I was working there on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb while standing in a former factory that produced ignition components. At the same time, I was surrounded by a beautiful landscape, while thinking about my Japanese American family’s history of internment. Holding those contradictions at once is how my body experiences history—not as a single moment, but as many overlapping timelines. That feeling is part of diasporic existence. The body remembers. DNA remembers.

So I ended up working with photography, image transfers, and then also textiles, watercolor. I wanted to create all these different types of time legibility in the work. I wanted the work to feel like an archaeological dig, where histories are embedded rather than placed on the surface. The goal was to create a sense of layered time—something you uncover rather than read directly.

To wrap up, can you share about your project at Socrates Sculpture Park?

I’m thrilled to be a Socrates fellow this year. It feels healing to work on an outdoor and public piece. I previously taught high school for many years at Long Island City High School, and I’m excited to reconnect with students and families. I was also looking forward to working with some of my past students from Queens College, Parsons, and Cooper Union.

The project draws inspiration from CHARAS, a Puerto Rican activist group from the 1970s that wanted to address issues like immigration, sustainability, education, and the housing crisis. In 1976, they collaborated with Buckminster Fuller to build several geodesic domes as community spaces in the Lower East Side. They started using them as these pop-up spaces for workshops, discussions, and community engagement.

I’m revisiting that history to ask how we can meet the same needs—housing, education, immigration—through collective action. I’ll be creating a mobile oral history recording station where people can share stories and bring meaningful objects. This project comes from listening—asking communities what they need. I can’t do everything, but as an artist, this is what I can offer. Over time, the structure will be dismantled and reconfigured into furniture for community gardens. My hope is that the work functions both aesthetically and practically, serving the communities it’s made for.

Natalia Nakazawa

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