Setsuko Winchester

Setsuko Winchester, creator of the Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project, is a writer, ceramicist and conceptual artist. Prior to moving to Western Massachusetts in 2006 to pursue a life-long interest in ceramics and the visual arts, she worked as a journalist, editor and producer at NPR’s Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation.

In 2010, she helped start her local newspaper, The Sandisfield Times, and contributed as managing editor and staff photographer. In 2015 those interests of art, history and journalism converged in an online project called the Freedom from Fear/Yellow Bowl Project. Using her ceramics and photography, her work explores what it means to be an “American” and questions what freedom could mean to different groups at different times in American history through the lens of the mass incarceration of people of Japanese ethnicity in the United States during WWII. The project included traveling across the US twice to some of the most remote parts of the country covering over 16,000 miles to get to all ten US concentration camps as they were called by the FDR administration.

In 2016, the artist was invited to create a site-specific image at the FDR Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY. The following year her contemporary images from the former camps were included as part of a yearlong photography exhibition in commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of FDR’s signing of Executive Order 9066. She and her tea bowls have been traveling ever since.

Learn more about her project at: www.yellowbowlproject.com/blog