Nishiki Sugawara-Beda

Nishiki Sugawara-Beda is a Japanese-American visual artist based in painting and installation. She draws upon her Japanese heritage to explore themes related to culture, language, and spirituality rooted in Zen Buddhism. Connecting across space and time, she experiments in ancient Japanese materials and techniques including Sumi ink, Kakejiku landscapes, and rice paper, to merge them with abstract and expressive forms familiar to the modern Western aesthetic.

Sugawara-Beda exhibits her work in solo and group exhibitions and offers lectures nationally and internationally to promote cultural diversity and exchange. Exhibition venues include the Spartanburg Art Museum (SC), Morris Graves Museum of Art (CA), Dennos Museum (MI) and Amos Eno Gallery (NY). Publications include New American Paintings, Expose Art Magazine, AEQAI, Athenaeum Review and the London Post. Awards including a Seed Grant, Diversity Fellow Program, International Enhancement Grant, Idaho Arts Fellowship, Sam Taylor Fellowship, and Tusen Takk Foundation residency, and Otis and Velma Davis Dozier Travel Grant have supported her artistic research.

In addition to national conferences, including the College Art Association, Sugawara-Beda also gives keynote speeches and workshops to cultural organizations including Pilipino American Unity for Progress, Inc., OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, and Business Council for the Arts, Dallas.

See You There, a full-color art book surveying her work from 2012 to 2020, is being published by Execute Magazine in 2021.