Hidemi Takagi: Identities

June 13 – July 26, 2026

IDENTITIES is a photography + interview project started with Hidemi Takagi’s family, a blend of Japanese and Haitian ancestry during the pandemic and portraying other biracial/multiracial teenage subjects. She seeks to envision deep roots and explore issues of mixed-race identities.

Takagi has been working with mixed-race teenagers for IDENTITIES with their parents’ consent, interviewing them and asking questions about how they feel about being mixed-race, their experience and dreams. She chose to work with this age group because teens today are more politically engaged, and they are our future. Takagi has worked with those subjects who lived in NY, NJ, Florida, Minnesota, and Japan so far. She is creating complex and whimsically self-costuming images of mixed-race life, its public and private faces, using her art as a tool to explore racial identity, race relations, public presentation of the self, and cultural norms.

Hidemi Takagi was born in Kyoto, Japan and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Takagi has exhibited both nationally and internationally (London, Madrid, Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Paris). Her notable selected exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, BRIC Media Art Center, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.
Takagi was awarded: The AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2004), the NYFA IAP Mentoring Program (2008), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Artist Studio Residency (2010), the Engaging Artist residency by More Art (2015), BRIC’s New Media Art Fellowship (2016), Utopian Practice Fellowship by Culture Push (2017), En Foco Photography Fellowship (2018), KODA Artist Residency: Identity + Justice (2020); The Brooklyn Arts Fund grants by BAC (2019 & 2021); The Sustainable Arts Fellowship by Gallery Aferro (2022), The Bandung 2022 Residency by MoCADA & The Asian American Arts Alliance (2022): Paradise AIR, Artist in residence: Chiba, Japan (2022), The Puffin Foundation Fellowship (2022 & 2024), The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement Grant (2022), Bridge to Kyoto Artist in residence: Kyoto, Japan (2024) and NYSCA FY2024 grant by the New York State Council on the Arts (2024).
Her work has been reviewed in Time Out Tel Aviv, Time Out New York, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. Her Blender project was selected for the Times Square Public Arts Program of the Times Square Alliance 2011.