AMY Y▦SHITSU
ARTIST/PRODUCT.DESIGNER\FOUNDER/COLLABORATOR\PROJECT.ORGANIZER
I am Amy Yoshitsu, a sculptor, designer, and socially engaged artist. I am a co-creator of Converge Collaborative. My practices are driven by context and research, commitment to empathy and solidarity, self-awareness, and continuous learning.
Amy Yoshitsu: Hedges and Ledgers
February-March 2023
Amy’s debut solo show in Chelsea, New York at Satchel Projects.
✨Listed as one of ARTnews’s must see shows for week of February 23, 2023.✨
Hedges and Ledgers features a group of photo-based sculptures, textile installation, a hanging cast sculpture, and aluminum-mounted photographs. Taken together, these objects collectively examine personal and political notions of place, the diaspora and assimilation culture.
In a series of printed paper constructions, curving, twisting, and sewn-together architectural images serve as psychogeographic maps. Over months and years, Yoshitsu has moved through urban spaces, attentively observing and documenting the built environment as she traversed it. The artist sought a variety of perspectives — walking, driving, from a train, from the roof — approaching each infrastructural element from different directions, and noting changes over time.
In creating sculptures and installations, I deconstruct the interconnections between power, economics, labor, and race. I seek to illuminate these systems’ foundational impacts on psychological schemas, sustained emotional states, and interpersonal relationships.
The concepts, imagery, and materials of my work are informed by infrastructure, which encompasses the act of supporting, the undergirding for creation, and the workforce maintaining our unsustainable global practices. The objects I make embody the reality that systemic forces are driven by economic and social incentives in power structures, which play greater than acknowledged roles in our individual material, cognitive and emotional conditions.
In 2020 I co-founded Converge Collaborative, a workers' co-op, digital creative agency and arts collective powered by BIPOC artists, creatives, and skill-based laborers who joined together to realize our collective vision of work rooted in solidarity, equity, and collaboration. We provide full service creative consulting and production from strategy and organization to release and marketing. Our skillsets include design, audio, film/video/photography, writing, engineering and more.
In my work designing software, websites, and brands, I always place the viewer/engager/customer’s expectations and needs at the fore while also valuing the process, the perspicacity of my fellow collaborators, and the need for actionable clarity within fast-moving complexity. The experience of any creation does not start with the viewer—though it can and should center them in a design context—but, in reality, is imbued with the many decisions, agreements, struggles and learnings of those by whom it was formed. I strive to unpack the psychological and social process of making as a method towards making more effective creations, products, end results.
CONVERSATIONS
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CONVERSATIONS
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CONVERSATIONS ⏥ CONVERSATIONS ⏢
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Amy Discusses AI Design
Amy was a guest on Creative Next podcast and speaks about enterprise design, ML and the future of design.
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Amy and Joana Discuss Assimilation and Diaspora
Amy and Joana Alarcão talk about the concepts that undergird Amy’s practice in Episodes 13 and 14: “Deconstructing Diaspora, Assimilation and Imperialism with Amy Yoshitsu.”
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"Full Embodied Life" Michelle McCrary + Amy Yoshitsu in Conversation
Amy and Michelle discuss their passion for music scenes and cultures, their identities as only children, and their experiences navigating workspaces while maintaining a sense of self. Listen to Ep 8 + 9 of Bring Your Full Self, a podcast created and produced by Converge Collaborative.
as a designer
I have worked in all aspects of product design and beyond: from ideation to conceptual model creation; to research and analytics; to design language system inception and management; to wireframes and pixel perfect mock-ups (plus, sometimes, front end coding). I have led these segments of the UX process for both new projects and those needing assistance while also contending with legacy systems. In fact, as the former Founder and VP of Design for Kleeen Software, I thought through and derived a system to automate these tasks and requirements.
I am enthusiastic about the infrastructural aspects of successful design: the fostering of generosity between and within teams, the techniques that facilitate step-by-step progress, the data and research-driven decision making, and the approaches that hold the collective history of choices and hand-offs. I believe in leveraging traditional and beta methods – in both project management and in design process and execution – while also incorporating new ideas. When facing a challenge, I look to literature and experts in other fields (psychology, sociology, philosophy, DIY consensus-based groups, etc) to determine if wisdom from contexts can be applied. I love exploring new software and methods that can either solve tasks more delightfully or matches the diverse ways we all take in and want to express concepts.
I am equally passionate about the end result – what the viewer sees in, understands of, does with a creation. I am always questioning and seeking to validate assumptions about the engager as I know that we, as creators, must follow the path that keeps people feeling seen, not the path that purely reflects our own internal process. I keep this in mind when creating the aesthetics and tone of an interface as I know voice and visuals, combined with the psychological, emotional and geographic state of a customer can have many implications. I have worked with technical and UI writers and so grateful when in a collaborative partnership focused on the multi-faceted ways humans internalize information. Once released, a creation can have a life of its own and receive all types of user feedback. As a creator and participant, I believe we must always keep take a critical and empathetic approach towards results and impact, both on the individual and macro-scale.
This site is currently under construction. More design and installation portfolio content coming soon!