Biography
Masumi Hayashi was born in 1945 in the Gila River War Relocation Camp in Rivers, Arizona, one of the United States government's War Relocation Authority camps, where Japanese-Americans were placed in internment during the World War II Era. The Gila River camp was on Indian reservation land.
Hayashi grew up in Watts (an area in Los Angeles, California) and graduated from Jordan High School. As an adolescent, she worked at her parents’ store, Village Market, on Compton Avenue. She attended UCLA and later went on to attend Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she earned a Bachelor's degree in 1975 and Master of Fine Arts degree in 1977.
Hayashi joined the faculty of Cleveland State University as Assistant Professor of Photography in 1982, and became a full professor in 1996. During her tenure at CSU, she received numerous awards, including an Arts Midwest, NEA fellowship in 1987, a Civil Liberties Educational Fund research fellowship in 1997, a Fulbright Grant in 2003, and Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council on three different occasions. She was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts in 1994.
Masumi Hayashi is perhaps best known for creating striking panoramic photocollages, using smaller color photographs (typically 4-by-6-inch prints) like tiles in a mosaic. Many of these large panoramic pieces involve more than one hundred smaller photographic prints; the rotational scope of the assembled collage can be 360 degrees or even 540 degrees. Much of her work explores socially uncomfortable spaces, including prisons, relocation camps, and Superfund cleanup sites.
Later in her career, her artwork reflected a deep interest in sacred sites, and she travelled several times to India and other places in Asia, to photograph spiritually significant spaces.
Masumi Hayashi (at age 60) and her neighbor, the 51-year-old artist and sculptor John Jackson (who also worked as a maintenance man at the apartment complex), were shot to death by a 29-year-old neighbor named Jacob Cifelli in their apartment building on Detroit Avenue on the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio, on August 17, 2006, after she had complained about Cifelli's loud music. Jackson was attempting to assist Hayashi after she was shot, when he was slain. She is survived by a son, Dean Keesey of Oakland; a daughter, Lisa Takata; a brother, Seigo; and four sisters: Connie, Amy, Nancy and Joanne.
Read more about this topic: Masumi Hayashi (photographer)
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