Rumi Tsuda

Biography

Rumi Tsuda, also known as Rumiko Tsuda, was born in Wakayama City, Japan, in 1947. She moved to Los Angeles in 1973, where she studied fashion design at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, and to New York in 1980, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art at the School of Visual Arts.

Her practice ranged across painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, ceramics, fashion and performance. She was known for colorful, exuberant portraits of strangers she encountered in New York, which fold everyday scenes into surreal invention, and for work that explored her Japanese and American identities; one body of work dresses classic American fashion dolls in hand-sewn traditional Japanese garments with hand-painted faces. Her estate's archive lists hundreds of ceramics along with painted wood blocks, textiles and skateboard decks. She was an alumna of Franklin Furnace, and in 1992 married the artist Daniel Georges, with whom she often collaborated.

Tsuda died in 2022. That autumn an open-house retrospective of her work was held in Walden, near Newburgh. Her work has since appeared in GODZILLA: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network at Eric Firestone Gallery (2024) and in PRISMA | Facets of Creativity at ADS Warehouse in Newburgh (2025), where other artists responded to her pieces. Her inclusion in Reclamation at Holland Tunnel Revisited in 2025 is presented through her estate.

Practice. Painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, collage, art fashion and performance; vivid portraits of strangers met in New York and works about bicultural Japanese-American identity.