Community in shock over area artists' deaths
Masumi Hayashi, 60, of Cleveland known for her photocollages
Dorothy Shinn,
art and architecture critic
Akron Beacon Journal
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Masumi Hayashi was a gentle soul, a practicing Buddhist and one of Northeast Ohio's most outstanding artists.
The shooting death of the highly esteemed, 60-year-old photographer in her apartment building on Thursday has stunned the artistic community.
``It's just very hard for all of us to believe that she's gone and in such a sudden, violent and meaningless way,'' said Akron Art Museum Chief Curator Barbara Tannenbaum.
``This is an enormous loss for Northeast Ohio,'' said photographer Andrew Borowiec, a professor at the University of Akron Myers School of Art. ``Masumi was a great photographer. Her work was in all the great collections. She was doing innovative work and she was one of the leading lights of the Northeast Ohio art community.''
Fellow artist John Jackson, 51, also was fatally shot during the incident. Both lived in an apartment building at West 75th Street in Cleveland.
A neighbor of the victims got into an argument with Hayashi after she called the man's mother to complain about loud music, according to the Cleveland Police.
The man fatally shot Hayashi outside her third-floor apartment and then shot Jackson while fleeing the building, Cleveland patrol officer Nancy Dominik said.
A 29-year-old man is being held in Cleveland City Jail under suspicion while the investigation continues, Dominik said. Charges are expected this weekend.
Hayashi was known for her large-scale photocollages taken at sites that were significant to her around the area and around the world. She had been a Cleveland State University art professor since 1982. Her most recent project was a series on the internment camps where Japanese Americans were placed during World War II.
``Masumi was born in a relocation camp,'' said Tannenbaum. ``She was born in Gila River. When she got her apology from President Clinton, she began to document the different location camps and to meet with the survivors and record their images and their words.
``It was a project she hadn't finished,'' Tannenbaum added. ``She was photographing their eyes and was continuing to photograph some of the sites.''
Jim Corcoran of Corcoran Fine Arts in Cleveland has exhibited Hayashi's work and is also devastated by the news.
``This is just a blow-away tragedy,'' said Corcoran. ``She was one of the most placid and pacific people you ever want to know.
``Masumi and I were really longtime friends. Her death is as inconceivable as anything I can think of. She had lived in that neighborhood forever, and she'd never had any problem of any kind with anybody,'' Corcoran added. ``The art world has lost someone of major importance. I think she was by all odds the most important artist working in Cleveland. She had an international reputation and exposure, showing from London to Tokyo.''
Jackson, the other tenant in the building who was killed, was also a prominent artist whose work had been exhibited in the Cleveland Museum of Art's NEO Show.
``It's just a very great loss,'' Tannenbaum said, ``both personally and in terms of artists who had many long working years ahead of them. It's so illogical, this killing, and ultimately wasteful of human life.
``Masumi was a practicing Buddhist and one of the most gentle, polite and generous people you'd ever want to know,'' Tannenbaum added. ``It's just so difficult to imagine someone lashing out like this toward someone like her.''
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