Yumi J. Roth
Boulder, CO
Artist's Website
Artist's Bio:
Yumi Janairo Roth was born in Eugene, OR and raised in Chicago, IL and Reston,VA. She received her B.A. in anthropology from Tufts University and her B.F.A. from the School for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. After a short stint of living in Chicago where she taught metalsmithing at Lill Street Studios, Yumi returned to graduate school and received her M.F.A. in metals from the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Before moving to Boulder to teach sculpture at the University of Colorado, Yumi lived in Appleton, WI, a small Midwestern town known more for its cheese factories, local luminaries (Joe McCarthy and Harry Houdini), and paper mills than for its art scene. However, as a professor at a small liberal arts college, Lawrence University, Yumi made the most of it.
While in Appleton, Yumi shopped the Home Depot, Menards, and her local St. Vincent de Paul thriftstore for both materials and ideas creating sculptural wall and floor works that were a combination of construction grade materials, discarded domestic objects, and fine craftsmanship. Her recent work includes modified police line barriers and traffic cones set up around urban, suburban and rural environments. Whether it's purloining images from the Department of Homeland Security's website or surreptitiously installing new barriers around town, she continues to explore themes of ornamentation, domesticity, and humor, but also touches on ideas of authority and propaganda and how these arenas might overlap. She has exhibited her work in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis and Seattle. As Yumi continues to make work, she hopes to identify and explore the details of daily life that we have come to accept through routine living. Through this exploration of objects and materials, she hopes to reveal our complicity with and occasional longing for the everyday.
