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Alan Nakagawa is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and often working with existing communities. Nakagawa has been working on semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors; Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover, which combines recordings of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah); Conical Sound; and Antoni Gaudi and Simon Rodia, which combines recordings of Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain). He is in his third year as the artist-in-resident at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple through Side Street Projects, developing multi-disciplinary art projects in response to the history of the Temple and the Post-WWII Japanese American community it represents, a Japanese tea house that was once on the Temple grounds, as well as responding to artifacts from when Japanese was spoken more in the community. He was the first artist in residence for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the Los Angeles County Library. Nakagawa was invited by the Smithsonian Museum of American History to research the development of the hearing aid in the U S. He currently resides in Los  Angeles’s Koreatown and continues to exhibit and develop his creative practice. He is currently working on a multi-disciplinary/book project about his trajectory to the variety of artist in residence opportunities he’s recently had the privilege of receiving. This project is a collaboration with Writ-Large Press and is tentatively scheduled to be published in 2022. Nakagawa is a recipient of two Art Matters grants, City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship, California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship and a Monbusho Scholar.

To see work by Alan Nakagwa, visit http://alannakagawa.com.

 Alumnx Exploration Series: Alan Nakagawa

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