Lars Shimabukuro • handwoven cotton with kasuri resist ties, dyed with indigo and fiber reactive dyes
ぎりぎり giri giri - At the edge, and just enough
On View: March 18 - April 11, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, April 10, 6-8pm.
This event is free and open to all.
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TAC is pleased to present ぎりぎり giri giri - At the edge, and just enough, a collection of recent works by weaver and UW-Madison Design Studies graduate student Lars Shimabukuro.
In ぎりぎり giri giri - At the edge, and just enough, Lars Shimabukuro presents a series of installations shaped by their first research trip to Okinawa, the ancestral homeland of their great-grandparents. Encountering the Ryukyu Islands for the first time, they experienced a striking sense of familiarity—red clay soil, sugar cane fields, orchids growing untended, and ocean crossings that echoed their upbringing in Hawai‘i. These parallel landscapes, both profoundly altered by U.S. military presence and environmental strain, form the conceptual ground of the work. Through careful attention to material and place, Shimabukuro reflects on migration, ecological depletion, cultural erasure, and the quiet persistence of memory.
Combining kasuri-dyed woven cloth, shifu paper yarn, woodworking, basketry, and cast glass, the installations create tactile, layered environments that invite slow looking and embodied reflection. For Shimabukuro, studio practice is an act of listening—learning from materials as teachers that hold tension, resilience, and tenderness. Visitors can expect work that considers how textiles and handmade forms bind us to land and lineage, reveal the healing work our communities require, and ask us to remain as responsive and adaptable as the materials themselves.
About the Artist
Lars Shimabukuro (b. 1991, Honolulu, Hawai’i) is an artist whose work expands ideas of homelands, family, and memory to include the queer landscapes that raised them. They earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Yale University in 2013, an Associate Degree from Haywood Community College (NC) focusing on weaving in 2019, and completed the Core Fellowship program at the Penland School of Craft in 2023. Shimabukuro has shown nationally and internationally, and teaches weaving at craft schools. He is currently pursuing a Design Studies MFA at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology in Madison, on unceded Ho- Chunk land.
Exhibitions at TAC are supported by the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation, Paula and David Kraemer, and by Dane Arts with additional funds from the Frautschi and Rowland Foundations, Diane Ballweg, and the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation.
If you are interested in information on supporting TAC’s nonprofit mission, and advancing creative expression through fiber art, please contact us.