Tamiko Kawata: Together II

Alison Bradley Projects is pleased to present Tamiko Kawata: Together II, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Spanning six decades of creative inquiry, the exhibition brings together works on paper, sculptures, and a new site-specific installation. The exhibition opens on November 20, 2025, with a reception from 6:00–8:00 p.m., remaining on view through January 24, 2026.

As a young hiker in the Japanese Alps, Tamiko Kawata would crane her neck toward pine trees, mountains, and waterfalls—each encounter a lesson in scale and interdependence. These early experiences impressed upon her the sublime realization of one’s own fragility and interconnectedness within vast natural systems. In our contemporary moment, where individual agency often feels diminished by legislative oversight, the omnipresence of media, and deepening political division, Kawata’s artistic practice—and indeed her very way of being—urges a return to the small, the tactile, and the human. Her largest work to date, Together II: Waterfall, is a monumental, site-specific installation that magnifies the conceptual and poetic possibilities of her signature material: the safety pin. Through Kawata’s transformative vision, this humble everyday object becomes a metaphor for collective resilience and interdependence.

Together II: Waterfall comprises 150 boxes—over 600 pounds—of safety pins, totaling approximately 216,600 individual units. The work unfolds across the gallery walls as an immense, undulating wave of silver. At eighty-nine years old, Kawata embarked on this ambitious project in the same collaborative spirit that has long animated her work. In a new commission produced with Alison Bradley Projects, Kawata held a series of public workshops over two weeks in New York City. More than 130 participants—artists, students, neighbors, and volunteers—gathered to learn Kawata’s sculptural technique, assembling ten-foot chains of interlinked pins. The repetitive yet mindful act of linking pins became an exercise in both craft and communion, an embodiment of the interpersonal connections that sustain community life.

Visually, the installation evokes the waterfall, a flowing torrent of silver that glimmers and sways against a deep indigo backdrop. This image draws from Kawata’s concept of nagare, the unifying flow of a running stream merging into larger waters. Through this metaphor, Together II invites viewers to imagine themselves as part of a global current—each individual strand contributing to a greater whole. Kawata’s sensitivity to materials mirrors that of a weaver, creating a texture that resembles draping fabric or rippling silk. The safety pin, humble on its own, gains strength through relation. The work thus becomes an embodiment of collectivity itself—its strength derived not from singularity but from the act of connection. The medium is the message: to link, to hold, to share weight is to be human.

In an era when traditional monuments—statues, plinths, memorials—are increasingly questioned for what and whom they commemorate, Kawata’s work proposes a different kind of monumentality: one rooted not in power, but in relation. Together II asks us to reconsider what endures and holds us together when so much seeks to pull us apart. Built through many hands and infused with many stories, the work offers itself as a living monument—an overflowing, life-giving refuge celebrating the generative potential of interdependence.