Leela Ramotar & Toyo Tsuchiya
Gallery Onetwentyeight
22 January, 2025 - 1 February, 2025
Exhibition Site & Press Release
Leela Ramotar (b. 1952, Guyana) is a painter, printmaker, and educator. She studied art and education at North East London Polytechnic and St. Mary's College in London before moving to New York in 1979 to attend the Brooklyn Museum School as a Max Beckmann Scholar. From 1981 to 1983, she studied printmaking at the Pratt Graphics Center. In 1985, Ramotar participated in the exhibition RAPE, dedicated to the memory of Ana Mendieta and juried by Suan Brownmiller, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer, at the Ohio State University Art Gallery. She was a member of REPOhistory (1989-2000), a New York City-based collective of artists and educators who developed public art interventions reckoning with the construction and display of history. Ramotar was an educator in the New York City public school system for two decades.
Toyo Tsuchiya (1948, Shizuoka, Japan - 2017 New York, NY) was a Japanese American artist and curator. From 1980 until his death in 2017, Tsuchiya resided on the Lower East Side among a community of immigrant artists who homesteaded vacant buildings in the 1980s and early 1990s and produced an extensive photographic and print record of an otherwise transient, largely unregistered artistic community. Before moving to New York City in 1980, Tsuchiya studied painting at Kawamara Painting Institute in Yokohama and at Osaka City Art Institute in Osaka, Japan. After taking up photography in the late 1970s, he became known for his photographs documenting performance and street art, which were circulated in publications such as The Act, High Performance, The Face, Soho Arts Weekly, and Red Tape Magazine. He was a founding member of the Rivington School (est. 1985) and his photographs illustrate the 2017 book Rivington School: 80s New York Underground. Though photography was the core of his practice, Tsuchiya revisited and repurposed his photographs in drawings, paintings, and collage, creating a large body of non-photographic works and participating in Mail Art networks in the United States and Japan. In 1999, he was awarded a Mid-Career Artist Exhibition by the Asian American Arts Center. Tsuchiya was also an active curator, organizing dozens of exhibitions throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the United States and Japan, including the 1985 apartment exhibition ASIA (Asian artists Show In A gallery) at Arleen Schloss' A Gallery, which included prominent Asian and Asian American artists Ai Wei Wei, Ming Fay, Tehching Hsieh, Kyong Park, Kazuko Miyamoto and Frog King Kwok, among others. From 1987-1990, he operated his own exhibition space, Tobe Art International Gallery, on Houston Street with Nancy Carin.
Tsuchiya's estate and archive are currently being cataloged by Elise Armani with the artist's family.