Garrick Imatani
Associate Professor, Visual Studies; Chair of the MFA, Visual Studies
Garrick Imatani is an artist who uses performance, functional objects, or implied physical interaction to think through positionality and the interconnected relations between community, state projects, and family. Working across sculpture, photography, video, drawing, and installation, many of his projects combine absurd, nuanced, and speculative approaches to encountered research, experience, and imagination.
Imatani's work has been exhibited at Blaffer Art Museum (Houston), Triumph Gallery (Moscow), Art in General (NYC), Portland Museum of Art (ME), ADA Museum at UC Santa Barbara, and in Oregon at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Chachalu Museum, Oregon Contemporary, and Portland Art Museum. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Ragdale, and has received grant support from The Andy Warhol Foundation, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Ford Family Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Maine Arts Commission, Regional Arts & Culture Council, and Oregon Percent for Art.
As an educator, Imatani takes an interdisciplinary approach and has taught across multiple ages and settings, including for community groups, art and education non-profits, and the public school system. Within higher ed, Imatani has taught a broad range of courses such as technical studios, off-campus projects, team-taught interdisciplinary colloquia, liberal arts curriculum, and art history/theory seminars across departments of sculpture, emerging media, digital arts, general humanities, design, and foundation studies at multiple institutions, including Columbia University and Maine College of Art. Outside of academia, Imatani has worked as a professional black & white photo printer, researcher and content writer for an exhibition design firm, studio manager for the artist Robert Longo, and carpenter/fabricator for a design-build architecture firm based in Brooklyn.
Between 2018-2022, Imatani served as Chair of the Foundation Program at PNCA, and was previously Head of Foundations at Lewis & Clark College and head of the Sculpture programs at Southern Oregon University and Ursinus College (PA). Imatani holds an MFA from Columbia University, NY and BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He currently resides in Portland, OR where he is an Associate Professor and Chair of the MFA in Visual Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art.