Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Printmaking, Collage
Website: mmmitsuokubooo.bigcartel.com
Mitsu Okubo was born in California in 1983. He earned an MFA in printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute and has since built a studio practice in San Francisco rooted in drawing, printmaking, and collage. Alongside his art practice, he has worked as an art handler and preparator specializing in museum and gallery installations throughout the Bay Area.
Okubo has exhibited at Incline Gallery, Ever Gold Gallery, Alter Space, and Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, and at Aggregate Space in Oakland. His work was included in SFMOMA’s survey Printed Publics: Contemporary Art and Design Publishing in the Bay Area (2019–2020), and his drawings and publications are held in the collections of MoMA and SFMOMA. His artist-designed apparel has appeared on HBO’s And Just Like That and Hulu’s Dave, and has been covered in VICE and Cultured magazines.
Okubo’s practice spans drawing, printmaking, and collage, unified by a deadpan absurdist wit. His pen-and-ink figural drawings range from the sexually vulgar to the violently uncanny, situated in domestic mundanity and rendered with a deceptively simple line. He has described making drawings “in a basement,” positioning his output as anti-monumental even as it enters major museum collections. The artist has framed his use of printmaking and drawing as a means to reconcile what he calls his failures as a stand-up comedian — humor operating as both method and subject.
A parallel strand of his practice consists of artist-designed apparel: t-shirts, hoodies, and sweaters bearing pun-based riffs on canonical art-world names. These objects occupy a productive tension between craft, critique, and consumer product, bringing the sensibility of his drawing practice into everyday life.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.