Grace Munakata

Her work is abstract but includes specific references, in part a response to a particular place, its light, weather and flora-fauna. An avid reader of literature and natural history, she’s fascinated by studying/observing reciprocal connections in nature. She feels paintings can be containers that can hold whole weather systems, generations of trees, and shifting memories. Everything can fit: a colored path of folded clothes for rolling the wheelbarrow from house to field, fragments of patterned fabric, ice spindles and tiny cloud forest fruit. In different cultures, people see the same stars but align them in different constellations, conflating stars far, far apart in time and distance. It is human to try to connect and collect glimmers we experience, to make something that during the process is both a refuge and an expedition. She received her MFA at the University of California, Davis and is a professor of painting and drawing at CSU East Bay.