Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota, a pivotal figure of the Fluxus group, and who was married to Nam June Paik (1932–2006), died last week in New York at the age of 77, Art Asia Pacific reports.
Kubota studied sculpture at the Tokyo University of Education before moving to New York in 1964, where she studied at New York University and the New School for Social Research, and developed her work with video and performance. In New York she was closely associated with avant-garde Fluxus artists including George Brecht, who named her ‘vice president’ of the Fluxus organisation. Her work includes the Vagina Painting performance at the Perpetual Fluxus festival in 1965, and My Father (1973-75), a video-eulogy for her own father. Kubota received numerous grants and awards, including a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship and 1998 Rockefeller Fellowship, and was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996. She spent a decade looking after Paik when he suffered a stroke in 1996, until his death.
28 July 2015.
