Setsuko Winchester

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 75 th
Anniversary of FDR’s signing of Executive Order 9066. Her latest project is called "The
Dissent Collars" which looks at the history of American Whiteness laws. It is part of a trilogy
along with a future work in the idea phase called "Buried History: The Plate Project" which
looks at the history of America through the lens of America's long history of race laws.
Learn more about her project at: www.yellowbowlproject.com/blog