Alum Kelly Akashi to Deliver the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture at Otis College
The acclaimed artist, whose boundary-pushing work has captivated audiences around the world, will discuss her practice and engage with current students.
Otis College of Art and Design’s Fine Arts program presents the Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture, “Kelly Akashi: Material Witnesses,” on Thursday, February 19, 2026, 7:00–8:30 pm. The event will be held in The Forum on Otis College’s campus at 9045 Lincoln Boulevard in Los Angeles and is free and open to the public. Register here.
Akashi (’06 BFA Fine Arts) was recently awarded a public sculpture commission for the new Terminal 1 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, NY, which will open in 2026. She was also awarded the Hyundai Terrace Commission for the 2026 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, which will open in March of 2026.
In 2025, Akashi was awarded the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and she was an artist
in residence at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington. Akashi received the Los Angeles
Museum of Contemporary Art’s Art + Technology grant in 2022.
During her Otis visit, Akashi will engage with students and their work. This intimate engagement between visiting artists and students is a distinctive hallmark of Otis’s Einstein Visiting Artist Lecture series.
About Kelly Akashi
Executed with deft manual skill and astute material knowledge, Kelly Akashi’s visual
language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing
fragmented moments in time. Her singular practice is characterized by a rigorous conceptual
approach, yet the work is distinguished by a deep reverence for process.
Always a student, Akashi is perpetually studying new practices and physical techniques, such as glass-blowing, casting, candle-making, and stone carving. The repeated use of the hand as motif serves as a symbol for Akashi’s ongoing investigation into the temporality of the human experience.
Often cast in bronze or crystal, her hands bear the mark of time on her body, her growing fingernails, and aging flesh. Towering sculpted weeds, delicately glass-blown flowers, a to-scale depiction of her body in polished travertine, enlarged casts of extinct species of shells—Akashi poetically and objectively encapsulates the notion of mortality in a ritualistic gathering of objects.
However, her take on her own practice is not a morbid one. Akashi references the phrase,
“mono no aware.” “It refers to a wistful awareness of impermanence—the ‘pathos of things.’ It’s
central to hanami, the Japanese custom of venturing out to enjoy the brief season
of cherry blossoms,” Akashi says.
Akashi was born in 1983 in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art
and Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014.
She also studied at the prestigious Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule)
in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2010.
