Barbara Hashimoto is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes sculpture, installation, performance, and photography.  She is particularly known for both her ceramic and paper-based work of intimate scale as well as her large-scale installations and comprehensive environmental art projects embracing activism and community engagement.

Previously based in New York, Tokyo, and Chicago, in 2020 Hashimoto relocated to Los Angeles where she formerly maintained a studio from 1995 to 2016. Educated at Yale, she was apprentice to ceramic artist Junko Yamada (Saitama, Japan) and Artist-in-Residence under Minoru Fujimori at the Awagami paper factory (Shikoku, Japan) and at Umdang Ceramics (Dan Kwain, Thailand). She studied dance in New York with Meredith Monk and Laura Dean, and butoh in Tokyo with Iwana Masaki.

Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York; The Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; The National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago’s Joan Flasch Collection, Chicago; The American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Pomona, California; and The Sam Maloof Foundation, Alta Loma, California. It is also widely held in private collections.

Hashimoto was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Musée du Montparnasse (Paris), Gallery UNO Projektraum (Berlin), Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Los Angeles), Dorothy Weiss Gallery (San Francisco), and The Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Arts and Design, Center for Arts and Visual Culture at The University of Maryland (Baltimore), Limbus Gallery (Tel Aviv), The American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, California), Laguna Art Museum, (Laguna, California), Center for Book Arts (New York), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), and in the following museums in Japan: Mito Modern Art Museum, Tokyo’s Ueno Royal Museum, Hokkaido Modern Art Museum, Fukuoka Museum, Gifu Museum, Shiga Museum, and Nagasaki Museum, among others.

Reviews and articles about Hashimoto’s work have appeared in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Weekly, Bangkok Post, Asahi Shinbun, and other publications. Her work is featured in Emmanuel Cooper’s Contemporary Ceramics — International Perspective and ISC Press’s The New Earthwork.