Today we’d like to introduce you to Sono Osato.
Hi Sono, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I began to study art at the age of five when I joined the Bemis Art School in Colorado Springs. By the time I was seven, I had made up my mind that art was my calling and stayed in Bemis until I left for college, receiving my BFA from ASU in 1983 and my MFA from the California College of Art in Oakland, CA in 1986.
I stayed in the Bay Area, exhibiting and teaching art until 2000, then moved briefly to Athens, GA to teach art at UGA and then on to NYC in 2001. I lived in Brooklyn with a studio in DUMBO until 2013. Then I became bi-costal. In 2016 I took an extended cross-country road trip and decided to sublet an apartment in Austin for a month to check out the city as I had been curious about it for years. The apartment was in the heart of the Zilker neighborhood, which I found very charming, especially because it’s within walking distance to Lady Bird Lake.
When the sublet was up, I went back to New York to work on my upcoming one-woman show. All through that year, the thought of moving to Austin stayed with me. I had become friends with the woman I sublet from and let her know I wanted to come to Austin for a more extended period to chill out and explore the third coast.
To make a long story short, she ended up subletting the apartment to me again and eventually transferred the lease to me because she was moving permanently out of state. Essentially, I moved to Austin because the stars had simply aligned. A few months later, I was struck by serendipity again when I wandered over to Thornton Road Studios during the Big Medium studio tour festival. I immediately hit it off with a few of the long-time creatives there and they tipped me off that a studio was opening up. They gave me the landlord’s cell, called him themselves to advocate for me and boom, I had a gorgeous studio within walking distance to my apartment just a few days later. It was meant to be.
What I love about being here, near downtown and just a hop over to the fun and lively South First and Congress districts, is the quality of life. I love that there’s so many pretty places to walk, right out my front door, that I can run errands without it taking up my entire day because everything I need is nearby, that I can pop down to the river after work and watch the sunset. What Austin has provided for me is a gentler pace of everyday life so that I can focus on my work with determined concentration.
I’m still a newbie in the Austin art scene but I’m learning my way around and making friends. There’s a lot of really good artists here and a kind of scrappiness to make things happen that’s invigorating. ICOSA (where I have an upcoming window exhibition), CoLab, Grayduck, Ivester Contemporary, Lora Reynolds, and Women and Their Work are but a few of great places to see art and among my favorites. And of course, the Austin Contemporary. I’m also fortunate to be in the community of creatives at Thornton Road which has been a cornerstone of Austin’s creative life for decades.
Austin is going through rapid changes with the explosion of real estate development and tech. My hope is that Austin’s art scene will intrinsically expand as well. Art is more than entertainment and decor, it lies at the very center of the vitality of a city. It’s a core aspect of its meaning and civic life. Austin has an enormous potential, not only with its homegrown population of artists but those who have moved here from other cultural centers adding to its diversity and vigor, myself among them. My hope is that the city and the wealth it’s attracting sees the enormous value of its art communities and invests in them as a necessary part of development. This can happen through private collecting, supporting galleries and contributing to the growth of art centers and programming. A flourishing art scene not only creates more opportunities for artists (which keeps them here), it makes Austin an even more exciting, dynamic and progressive city than it already is, ramping up the quality of life for all Austinites, and I want to be a part of that.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The life of an artist is not easy. Making genuine work requires vulnerability. Making unique work often means that it demands more from the viewer than something they immediately recognize or understand, beckoning them to look more deeply and spend more time contemplating what’s before them. Commitment to a vision means that you have to be able to handle rejection and you have to believe in yourself, especially when things aren’t going well. Financially it’s living life on the edge. Because art is so subjective sales can be inconsistent while the overhead of studio space, materials and time to work remains at the door. I’ve had many ups and downs, financially and emotionally because I’ve chosen a life of enormous risk. It’s not clear cut and occupies the ephemeral world of the human imagination, poetics, intuition…transformation. It’s a tough life, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. When a piece works, when it reaches people and touches them, there’s nothing like it. And I love creative people. I surround myself with them. In this way, I’m very rich.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’ve been a professional artist for thirty-five years and counting in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and now Austin for the past three. I’ve worked in installation, found object assemblages, and a great deal of painting. Like many artists, I have an internal story of what inspires and drives my work and it keeps evolving.
From the beginning, I’ve been inspired by archeology and geology. My earlier work is very topographical in form and non-representational in subject. Over time, I became interested in the origins of writing and how it grew out of the very human need to make marks, dating back 400,000 years. I started to tear apart old typewriters. I’d use the larger parts for my assemblages and the smaller pieces went into my paintings lodged between the layers, resembling an archeological dig. Over time the thickness of layers receded to reveal tracings of the machine parts themselves, resembling ancient hieroglyphics and alphabets in transparent layers, like a palimpsest. My recent paintings became very lyrical.
What I’m after in conjuring ancient forms with contemporary practice is the notion that if we reach back far enough, we all share the same origin story. At the end of the day, we are all each other. This poetic line of thought is what holds my work together, more than an immediately recognizable brand or formula. It’s more a flow of ideas that has evolved from making one piece after another, responding to what I discover as I keep working. Collectors, critics and gallerists who have followed my work for years recognize my work because they’re familiar with my ideas and have connected the dots, but they can’t predict (and nor do I exactly) what’s coming next. I follow my instincts, and like all things in life, my work is constantly in the process of transformation.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
If people wish to support my work, they can visit my website and follow me on Instagram to learn more about it. They can also join my mailing list and reach out to me for a studio visit. Collecting art is a very personal process and developing a relationship with artists is a very important part of the process.
Contact Info:
- Email: sono@sonoosato.com
- Website: https://sonoosato.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sono_osato/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SonoOsatoArtist
