Art dedicated to a spiritual sense of place
Noa Miyeko Piper
Art dedicated to a spiritual sense of place
Artist Bio
Noa Miyeko Piper is a community justice facilitator and fifth-generation professional artist on her mother’s side, and comes from a family of working artists based in Seattle. She spent much of her first four years in an art studio in Venice Beach, California, where her mother taught art. After she and her mother moved to Port Townsend, Washington, Noa was fortunate enough to be surrounded by a rich community of artists and was able to show and sell her work with professional artists from an early age.
After attending Whitman College on a full scholarship for community organization, Noa studied linguistics, anthropology, and art, especially printmaking, under Keiko Hara. Upon leaving Whitman, she took classes at the University of Washington and began her study of Seattle’s neighborhoods, a continuing interest, in part by visiting every branch of the Seattle Public Library in the city.
In 2006, a former Whitman classmate familiar with her work invited Noa to show at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis, California, her first solo exhibition. Later that year, she was accepted into the Tashiro Kaplan Artist Lofts in Pioneer Square, where she has lived and worked for the past 17 years. Its proximity to Seattle’s historic Japantown has special significance to her, as a fourth-generation Japanese-American. She finds purpose and meaning through both her art and community organizing because of the place the Tashiro Kaplan Arts Community occupies in both time and space.
As an abstract expressionist, Noa’s work is at times figurative or references nature, often taking delight in moving playfully between micro and macro views. Fascinated by algorithms and the prediction of movement and behavior, her paintings’ details might incorporate references to specific biological forms, technological developments, computer programming, or video games. Through an approach dedicated to art and community, this body of work has arisen as a specific response to living and working as an artist in the Tashiro Kaplan Arts Community in Pioneer Square, Seattle (Dzidzilalich). Noa’s paintings are spiritual compositions dedicated to a sense of place.
(Writing credit: Eric Swenson)
Noa Miyeko Piper
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