Gentle soul remembered for her singular vision
Steven Litt,
Plain Dealer Art Critic
The Plain Dealer
Saturday August 19, 2006
Friends and colleagues of internationally renowned Cleveland photographer Masumi Hayashi couldn't reconcile the quiet serenity of her career and her artwork and the violence of her death Thursday.
"She was a practicing Buddhist and absolutely one of the most light and reticent souls in terms of confronting anybody," Barbara Tannenbaum, chief curator of the Akron Art Museum, said Friday. "This is one of those incidents where there is no sense to be made of it. It's almost not believable, and yet it has happened."
Hayashi, 60, was shot to death Thursday in the condominium where she lived and worked in a renovated early 20th-century bank building at the southeast corner of West 75th Street and Detroit Avenue in Cleveland.
John Jackson, 51, an accomplished artist who lived in the building, was also found shot to death.
Jackson, who earned a bachelor's degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art, had exhibited in Cleveland and Philadelphia since the 1970s and most recently had displayed a large, abstract painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art's "NEO Show" in the fall of 2005.
Hayashi was among the most successful artists living in Cleveland.
Born in 1945 in the Gila River Relocation Camp in Rivers, Ariz., she earned a bachelor's degree in 1975 and a master of fine arts degree in 1977, both at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She joined the art faculty of Cleveland State University, where she rose from assistant professor to full professor and taught generations of photography students.
As a teacher, "she was critical always in a positive way," said Steve Wainstead of New York, software development manager for an online photo site who took courses from Hayashi in the 1990s. "I never heard her say a harsh word of criticism."
As an artist-photographer, Hayashi was best known -- in Cleveland and nationally -- for collaging 4-by-6-inch color photographs like tiles in a mosaic to create 360-degree views of abandoned prisons, relocation camps where Japanese-Americans were held during World War II and EPA Superfund sites.
"She was internationally recognized as an artist and as a photographer," said Karin Higa, senior curator of art at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. "Yet she was firmly rooted in Cleveland and seems really to have connected with her adopted home."
Higa said Hayashi's photocollages "commented on the beauty and desolation and hidden stories in the American landscape." She said Hayashi also explored the experiences of Japanese-Americans "not as a marginal story but as part and parcel of that American landscape."
In her most recent series, Hayashi photographed the eyes of former detainees at the World War II relocation camps.
"You really got the sense her best work was yet to come," Higa said.
Hayashi moved to her condominium in 1993 as an urban pioneer who wanted to bring life back to a struggling neighborhood, friends said.
Linda Butler, also a widely known Cleveland photographer, said she had been planning a potluck dinner party for women photographers at Hayashi's apartment next Wednesday evening.
"We were going to talk about how our summers went, and our work," Butler said.
Cleveland photographer Penny Rakoff said that while Hayashi assembled her collages in a studio on the first floor of her building, she often spent hours at her desk in the living room in her third-floor condominium, writing grants and preparing for shows.
Rakoff also said Hayashi had had a long-running feud with a neighbor who played music so loud it made the work table in her living room vibrate and made it difficult for her to sleep at night. Police have arrested the neighbor, Jacob Cifelli, 29, in the shootings.
"Her personal and professional life were totally intertwined," Rakoff said. "She lived by herself. She never said she felt unsafe, but she was really having a hard time getting her work done."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
slitt@plaind.com, 216-999-4136
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