Oral history interview with Alice Kagawa Parrott, 2005 July 10, Transcript
Oral history interview with Alice Kagawa Parrott, 2005 July 10, Digital Sound Recording (Excerpt)
Originally recorded on 2 sound discs. Reformatted in 2010 as 4 digital wav files. Duration is 1 hr., 27 min.
An interview of Alice Kagawa Parrott conducted 2005 July 10, by Paul J. Smith, for the Archives of American Art's Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America, in Santa Fe, N.M.
Parrott speaks of her childhood in Hawaii; her extended family's fate in the atomic bombing at Hiroshima; her education at the University of Hawaii, The Cranbrook Academy of Art, and at the studio of Marguerite Wildenhain, at Pond Farm, in Guerneville, California; her teaching years at the University of New Mexico and on the island of Maui; her marriage to Alan Parrott in 1956; her travels in Mexico, Guatemala, and India; and her various exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad. She recalls Claude Horan, Hester Robinson, Ernestine Murai, Anna Kang Burgess, Toshiko Takaezu, Marianne Strengell, Maija Grotell, Jack Lenor Larsen, Rufino Tamayo, Isamu Noguchi, George Nakashima, Joan Mondale, and Aileen Osborne Webb, and others.
Alice Kagawa Parrott (1929-2009) was a Japanese American fiber artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Paul J. Smith is the Director Emeritus, American Craft Museum, New York City, New York.
This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.