The artwork: Kimiko’s “New Orleans Series” is the latest photographic series she has completed in recent years, this one inspired by her love of New Orleans. The images make it clear that the spirit of New Orleans remains. She walked the streets day and night to stay focused on what New Orleans is like now, not then. She captured the good, the bad, and the ugly. While Kimiko’s black and white photography can stand alone, she prefers to return from her travels and paint in the color that she wants the images to have. Each piece of her work is an original, hand-painted piece. Altogether, the images offer an intriguing tour of this fabled city seen in its new circumstance, with beauty and dignity still intact.
The artist: Japanese-born Kimiko Sakai graduated from Toyo University in 1982. She came to America and moved to Nashville in 1995. Soon after, she studied photography at Nashville State Technical College and began quickly to develop her own photographic style and techniques. Tutored by some of her painter friends, she began to focus on hand painting each image to make each piece unique. By 2000, she had already won a national photography contest, and was well on her way with her own professional career. In 2007, Travelers Rest commissioned Kimiko to identify and document sites in Nashville related to “The Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century Nashville,” an exhibit curated by Rob DeHart and presented as a one-person show at the Metro Public Library downtown.
