Janet Sternburg

Splendor, 1999
Photography C-prints in restaurant windows
40 x 30 inches

Through the Little Tokyo community spirit, Azay, this beloved restaurant at 226 First Street, between San Pedro and Los Angeles Streets is displaying the work of Janet Sternburg in their windows.

Artist Statement
My work is about revealing an interpenetrating world. To that end, I use no manipulation whatsoever. I work with single-use and iPhone cameras because their limitations give me what I want, images that are close to the way our minds work.

About Azay Restaurant
Azay is the homecoming of Chef Akira as he explores the intersection of history, cuisine, and community in the former space of
Anzen Hardware, Little Tokyo. 

Born and raised in Kyoto, Japan, Akira trained in the French countryside of Azay-le-Rideau and Paris, having worked at Maxim’s de Paris and the hotel Nikko under Joël Robuchon. After being recruited to work at the esteemed L’Orangerie in Los Angeles, he and his wife opened a French restaurant in Kyoto, Japan then Pasadena, California, which closed in March 2019 after celebrating 20 years as Maison Akira. 

The new menu at Azay will celebrate his experiences professionally in the kitchens, gardens, and communities of the culinary world as well as the personal relationships he made along the way.

Janet Sternburg
Splendor, 1999
Photography C-prints in restaurant windows
40 x 30 inches

Biography
Janet Sternburg is a polymath: an artist of photography, a writer of literary books, a maker of theatre and films, an educator, all in the service of a singular vision which has always been at the forefront of cultural change. Since 1998 when she began taking photographs, her work has appeared in a portfolio in
Aperture (2002), and that same year in a cover story and portfolio in Art Journal. Her photography has been exhibited in solo gallery shows in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Milan, as well as at cultural institutions in Mexico and Seoul Korea where she received a commission for a full-building installation using projection and multiple monitors. A monograph of her photographs, Overspilling World: The Photographs of Janet Sternburg, was published in 2016-17 by Distanz Verlag with a Foreword by Wim Wenders. In 2018, the USC Fisher Museum of Art presented her solo show, LIMBUS.