Yumi Janairo Roth was born in Eugene, Oregon and raised in Chicago, Illinois and Reston, Virginia. One side of her family hails from the Philippines while the other side can be traced to the early American settlers, positioning Roth as both subject and agent of colonialism. Her work as an artist is not rooted separately in the Philippines and the US (or being Asian and not Asian), but is in constant negotiation between multiple categories and received ideas. In the early 1970s, Roth’s family lived in Manila, only to return to the States the year after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. Over the last several years, Roth has returned to the Philippines to work as an artist-in-residence at both the Ayala and Vargas Museums, producing works that explore how we map space and value labor. In Transition for BMoCA will bring together those projects along with works developed for Houston and the Czech Republic-all projects which represent her interest in mixing categories in order to understand how we reinterpret objects, situations, and ourselves through new hybrids. Roth received a BA in anthropology from Tufts University in 1993, a BFA in visual arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1993, and her MFA in metals from SUNY New Paltz in 1998. She has been on the faculty at CU-Boulder since 2002.
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