Shizu Saldamando

Shizu Saldamando is an LA based Japanese/​Latinx American mixed media artist whose portraits give visibility to urban youth, part of subcultures and countercultures. She has explored portraiture for two decades, capturing images of real people, her friends from the punk scenes in San Francisco’s Mission District, and those in the creative community in LA. Primarily concerned with portraiture and drawings, she experiments with a broad range of surfaces and materials from wood panels to bed sheets. Saldamando’s practice employs tattooing, video, painting and drawing on canvas, wood, paper, and cloth, and functions as homage to peers and loved ones. Her mother’s family is Japanese American and survivors of the Japanese American Internment camps. Her father is a Chicano from Nogales, AZ.

A selection of her solo exhibitions include LA Intersections, Oxy Arts, Highland Park, CA; When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA; All Tomorrow’s Parties, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, PA; and Too Return, Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. Selected group exhibitions include: Phantom Sightings at Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portraits of the Encounter, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Trans-Pacific Borderlands, part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative at the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA; We Must Risk Delight: Twenty Artists from Los Angeles, an official collateral exhibition of the Venice Biennale; Drawing the Line at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA and The High Art of Riding Low at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, CA. She is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.

Shizu Saldamando’s work is on view at the Institute for the Humanities (Suite 1111, 202 S. Thayer St.) from November 2 through December 10, 2021.

How to Watch

This Penny Stamps Speaker Series event will première on November 11, 2021 at 8pm and can be viewed on this page, at dptv​.org, or on the Penny Stamps Series Facebook page.

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities. Our Fall 2021 Series is brought to you with the support of our partners, Detroit Public Television and PBS Books.