‘Kay Sekimachi: Geometries’ Exhibition Bows at BAMPFA

It is a big year for Kay Sekimachi. In September, the fiber artist, whose pieces are in the permanent collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, turns 95. Before that, “Kay Sekimachi: Geometries” bows at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, her first solo exhibition in the city she’s called home since 1930. A first-generation child of Japanese immigrants who was forcibly resettled in internment camps during World War II, Sekimachi’s art incorporates origami, rice paper, and chopsticks, but what initially put her on the map in the 1960s were her complex three-dimensional nylon-monofilament hangings. Her more recent pieces—she still actively weaves in her Berkeley studio—are small-scale minimalist weavings created in homage to the paintings of Paul Klee and Agnes Martin. A selection of 53 of her works have been chosen for the exhibition, which launches the reopening of BAMPFA to the public since the pandemic shutdown last year.