Heidi Kumao


Ann Arbor, MI

Moving Image & Fiber Art


Heidi Kumao translates intangible emotional experiences into poetic visual narratives and hybrid art forms including electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, surreal experimental stop motion puppet animations, performative staged photographs, cinema machines, and stitched fabric drawings. Her recent narrative fabric works, “Real and Imagined,” use fabric cutouts and stitching of common objects (such as chairs, roots, ladders, or spotlights) on industrial felt to create a tactile visual vocabulary that distills unspoken—often sinister— aspects of daily human exchanges into accessible narrative images.

Fueled by the ongoing battles over reproductive rights, the #MeToo movement, and personal experience with traumatic loss and separation, the art works underscore the courage of women who report assault and abuses of power amid public skepticism. The title, “Real and Imagined,” is a direct reference to how her testimony is received: her account is accepted as truthful by many and dismissed as imaginary by the court of public opinion: “he was only joking.” Intentionally minimal, each image distills an interaction, traumatic incident, or power imbalance into an accessible and poetic visual narrative.

The illustrated publication, “Heidi Kumao: Real and Imagined,” includes color reproductions and essays about the work and received a Gold Award from the 2023 Midwest Book Awards and a Silver Award from the 2023 Nautilus Book Awards. It can be purchased online. https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/41687m014

She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally including one-person exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and Arizona State University Art Museum. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the ArtScience Museum, Singapore, CCCB: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and the Wing Luke Asian Art Museum (Seattle, WA), and many others. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her film, “Swallowed Whole,” about breaking her back, screened in over 25 film international film festivals and was awarded “Best Experimental Film” at the Female Eye and Big Muddy Film Festivals, Seoul International Extremely Short Film Festival, and Humboldt International Film Festival. She is a Professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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