Yukie Ohta
Artist in Residence
July 2022

Yukie Ohta is an archivist, collage artist, SoHo native, and founder of the SoHo Memory Project, a nonprofit organization that celebrates and preserves the history of SoHo as a New York City neighborhood so that present generations understand the neighborhood’s rich history and can make informed decisions about its future.

For the past decade, Ohta has been collecting archival materials that document the transformation of SoHo from a declining industrial area to a thriving artists’ community in the 1960s and 1970s. And, in the face of ever-shifting proposals by the city to reshape the community, Ohta lends her unique perspective as an "archivist activist” to current public debate. In the near future, Ohta’s SoHo Memory Project will move to its permanent home at the New-York Historical Society’s Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.  Ohta, who is also an artist, lives with her artist husband and daughter in the SoHo building where she grew up.

"SoHo Memory Project is a labor of love and my way of giving back to the community that raised me," writes Yukie. "My now retired parents, a painter and a poet by nature, and a carpenter and general contractor by trade, came to SoHo from Japan in the 1960s to build a life, and what a life it was. I experienced a singular childhood spent inhabiting a magnificent built environment in a community of extraordinary creatives, all the while thinking that that was how everyone lived. Back then, I had no idea how lucky I was. With 50 years of hindsight, it is unfathomable to me that before now there was no repository that held the evidence of a now-fading artists community and the 26 blocks of cast iron buildings it fought to preserve."

Portrait photo by Ryan McGinley for Uniqlo