Lenhardt Lecture: Kelly Akashi

Kelly Akashi is coming to the Phoenix Art Museum on Wednesday, April 14, 2027, for a talk in Whiteman Hall. It's part of the David and Dawn Lenhardt Lecture series, which the museum has been running since 2018. Before Akashi, the series has brought in Jim Hodges, Shara Hughes, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Teresita Fernández, and Adam Pendleton.

Akashi works with glass, bronze, crystal, stone, and ash, and she describes her sculptures as giving physical form to memory, inheritance, and loss. She takes intimate objects and turns them into pieces that register time and change. Much of that comes from the way she works: glassblowing, stone carving, casting, and candle-making are all hands-on processes, and she approaches mortality as a contemplative condition. If you've seen her work, you know how much the materials themselves—the weight of the stone, the fragility of the glass—do a lot of the heavy lifting.

She's born in 1983 and teaches as Core Faculty in Grad Art at ArtCenter College of Design. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, Frye Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Henry Art Gallery, SculptureCenter, and Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Milano. She's also worked on public commissions, including a monumental installation for JFK International Airport's New Terminal One and projects for the 2026 Whitney Biennial. MOCA Los Angeles named her a 2024 Distinguished Woman in the Arts.

The lecture runs from 6:30 to 8:00 PM at Whiteman Hall, inside the museum at 1625 North Central Avenue. It's free for members and $5 for the general public.