Karin Higa was a scholar and curator committed to illuminating the historical significance and ongoing influence of Asian American art and cultural production. Primarily recognized as an art historian, she was a museum worker whose career was institution- and field-building. During her 14-year tenure at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles, she curated foundational exhibitions and contributed to developing an unparalleled collection of artifacts, archival materials, artwork, and oral histories that are mined by scholars and curators from around the world. As director of the JANM exhibitions and curatorial department, she cultivated professional practices that center community meanings and accountability.

Born and raised in Culver City in Los Angeles County, California, Higa earned her BA in art history from Columbia University, and her MA at UCLA. In 1992, she curated the groundbreaking exhibition The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942-1945 presented at the UCLA Wight Art Gallery in collaboration with JANM and informed by substantial consultation with the artists themselves or their surviving family. 

Higa insisted that Asian American artists be considered not at the margins but as integral to academic art history discourse and for their impact on broad-reaching aesthetic practices and sensibilities in the US. She emphasized the artists’ individual visions and productions—but she also accounted for the interplay of multiple expressive categories, including the traditional/vernacular, and the influence of cultural heritage and community networks on individual creative practices. In the 2008 exhibition Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art, Higa explored how different forms of cultural production inform one another, displaying works of contemporary art alongside floral installations created by Southern California-based masters of three traditional ikebana schools.

In addition to the shows she curated, as JANM curatorial director, Higa oversaw the production of projects that focused on the shaping role of community and tradition on expressive behavior, among them: Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden (2007), Big Drum: Taiko in the United States (2005), Finding Family Stories (2003), and Crafting History: Arts and Crafts from America’s Concentration Camps (2002).

Karin Higa was a founding participant in Godzilla, the NYC-based Asian American Arts collective, and taught art history at Mills College, the University of California, Irvine, and Otis College of Art and Design. At the time of her passing, she was working on her dissertation at the University of Southern California, “Little Tokyo, Los Angeles: Japanese American Art and Visual Culture, 1919-1941.” 

A posthumous collection of her writings was edited by Julie Ault. Hidden in Plain Sight: Selected Writings of Karin Higa (2022)

Among her exhibition catalogs:

Edited with Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, James A. Hirabayashi, Brian Niiya, and Wakako Yamauchi. The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942-1945. (1994)
Living Flowers: Ikebana and Contemporary Art. Japanese American National Museum, (2009)

S. Kim