I’m mixed race Japanese. My mom is an immigrant from Japan and my dad is Italian American and they named me Gina, which actually has a meaning in both languages―it’s Italian for queen and Japanese for silver. And then I was named Ariko after my baachan, my mom’s mom. I was the “darkest” kid at school, even being at home or within my own family too. I didn’t look like my mom. I didn’t look like my dad. I remember feeling like I was definitely wrong. In school, we’d be asked to draw self-portraits. Multiple times, I would draw myself with blue eyes. There was a family across the street from us that had a little girl that was the same age as me. She had blond hair and light eyes. I used to really think she looked the “right way” and was envying, particularly her hair. I said to her one time, “I wish I had your hair. I wish I had your hair color,” and she responded, “What? My hair? It’s just hair color.” I could tell that me saying it was the first time she’d ever even thought about her hair color. Even being 6, I remembered clocking her reaction because it said to me, she’s never thought about this and it made me realize I think about this all the time.

In the summers, my mom would take me and my sister back to Japan and we’d stay as long as we could. Most of our time was spent with my baachan and jichan. Both of my grandparents were working artists and had been their whole careers. Their home really was oriented around art making. We had a language barrier but we could draw next to each other. It definitely made me feel like, I like art and you like art and that means I fit in here, when there’s distance and language and other things that made me feel insecure about my enoughness. I had this feeling that this was something that made me part of this family.

For my art major in college, I had to have a capstone project to graduate. I happened to be assigned a professor who was head of the art and art history department. He never liked my work. He was an old White man and was pretty condescending. The night before while installing the show, I can’t even remember specifically what he said but I just remember being devastated. I had paintings of my jichan and baachan, of my mom, and me and my mom all dressed in kimono. I left and went home and sobbed. It really sucked the wind out of my sails and I felt a lot of shame too. It did not seem possible to be an artist, a working artist. I didn’t even really try. Years later, I brought the art work back into my life and had this focus of wanting to be an artist and prioritizing it again. When I was filling out the business paperwork, I filled everything out as Gina Ariko Studio. Seeing “Gina Ariko” gave me this constant reassurance. If she could do it, I could do it and I felt like seeing her name next to mine, she was there with me.