Lua Kobayashi: The Persistence of Memory at the Griffin Museum turns family stories into a quiet, moving installation. On view from September 11 through October 25, 2026, the exhibition is the result of Kobayashi’s 2025/2026 Cummings Residency Prize, during which the artist spent time in the greater Boston area listening to Japanese American individuals and families share objects, photographs and memories that have traveled with them across generations.
In living rooms, kitchens and other everyday spaces, participants offered paintings of concentration camps, inherited household items and handwritten notes meant for descendants. These belongings are not displayed as static artifacts. Through projection, they become animated landscapes and spirits, shifting between stillness and motion. The work draws on the Japanese idea of tsukumogami, the belief that objects, after long use, can awaken with their own presence. Here, photographs, notes and objects seem to breathe, carrying the touch and time of those who kept them.
Kobayashi, a mixed Japanese American and Uruguayan artist based in Southern California, works across photography, video and installation. Her practice treats memory as something carried rather than recorded, shaped by displacement, care and the act of keeping. In this project, the camera becomes a way to enter conversations about what it means to be Japanese American today, and how culture survives through daily rituals, stories and the things people choose to hold onto.
The installation honors individual lives while pointing to broader, often overlooked histories of Japanese American communities in the Boston region. Some physical objects appear alongside the projections when possible, creating a dialogue between the material and the projected image. The result is a space for remembrance that does not demand spectacle. It asks viewers to move slowly, to notice how objects hold memory and how families sustain continuity across time.
The Cummings Residency Prize, funded by the Cummings Foundation from 2023 to 2026, enabled the Griffin to support photographers from diverse backgrounds and to deepen engagement with the local community. Kobayashi’s exhibition extends that mission, presenting a body of work that is at once personal and collective, rooted in trust and the quiet persistence of memory.
Image: © Lua Kobayashi
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