The Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series: Kelly Akashi

The Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series: Kelly Akashi
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Artist Lecture & Q&A: 7:00–8:30 pm
T he Forum on the Otis College of Art and Design Campus
9045 Lincoln Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045

Join us for an evening with acclaimed artist and Otis alum Kelly Akashi, whose boundary-pushing practice has captivated audiences around the world. Space is limited, and admission is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

This lecture is made possible thanks to the generous support of Cliff Einstein and his late wife Mandy. The Mandy and Cliff Einstein Visiting Artist Series offers the Otis community an opportunity to engage with acclaimed creatives who are shaping contemporary art today.

About Kelly Akashi
Executed with deft manual skill and astute material knowledge, Kelly Akashi’s visual language emphasizes the impermanence of the natural world, recording and indexing fragmented moments in time. Her singular practice is characterized by a rigorous conceptual approach, yet the work is distinguished by a deep reverence for process. Always a student, Akashi is perpetually studying new practices and physical techniques such as glass-blowing, casting, candle-making and stone carving. The repeated use of the hand as motif serves as a symbol for Akashi’s ongoing investigation into the temporality of the human experience. Often cast in bronze or crystal, her hands bear the mark of time on her body, her growing fingernails, and aging flesh. Towering sculpted weeds, delicately glass-blown flowers, a to-scale depiction of her body in polished travertine, enlarged casts of extinct species of shells; Akashi poetically and objectively encapsulates the notion of mortality in a ritualistic gathering of objects. However, her take on her own practice is not a morbid one. Akashi references the phrase mono no aware. “It refers to a wistful awareness of impermanence—the ‘pathos of things.’ It’s central to hanami, the Japanese custom of venturing out to enjoy the brief season of cherry blossoms.”

Kelly Akashi was born in 1983 in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design in 2006 and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014. She also studied at the prestigious Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2010. Akashi was the Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School for 2025. Recent solo exhibitions include Kelly Akashi, Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (February 19 - March 29, 2025), Kelly Akashi–Converging Figures, Fondazione Furla Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy (September 13 - December 8 2024), Kelly Akashi: Encounters at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (September 30, 2023 - June 15, 2024), and her 10-year survey, Formations, which began at the San José Museum of Art in 2022, travelled to the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and then to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, through 2024.

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