91吃瓜

Walking through campus, you may notice the large sequoia tree outside the south entrance of the Pigott Building adorned with colorful pompoms. This art installation, Apology Pompoms for Healing: Message to the Land and Ancestors, is comprised of yarn pompoms created by about 70 students, faculty, staff and community members, crafted into patterns designed by Professor Naomi Kasumi, MFA.

When Kasumi, who is director of SU’s design program, was asked to lead an interactive workshop for this year’s Racial Equity Summit, she reflected on the difference of culture she faced in America versus her home city of Kyoto, Japan.

“I realized that many American people don’t apologize. They deny their mistakes,” Kasumi says. “But in Japanese culture, we apologize. If you made somebody uncomfortable, that means it’s your fault. You need to apologize to care about others.”

Kasumi originally did an apology pompom workshop for the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) in 2017. The mindful activity involves creating a pompom from yarn and attaching an apology note to it. Those who struggle with the apology portion were encouraged, through the workshop, to be vulnerable while also thinking about how one’s actions impact others.

Professor Naomi Kasumi, MFA, in front of the impressive art installation. 

This type of humility and accountability is essential, says Kasumi, when working toward equity and inclusion. Stepping into American culture as a foreigner, Kasumi has experienced how the lack of an apology can manifest in ignorance and microaggressions. Her hope is that this work plants a seed of caring that will grow to include strangers of other races and nationalities.

In preparation for the workshop Kasumi enlisted design students Julie Pham, ’26, Ahlam Darwish-Elhaji, ’25, and Hannah Kuhnhausen, ’26, to assist and get firsthand experience on how a professional artist works. This type of community-engaged art practice is at the heart of Kasumi’s research and creative work.

“How I engage the community in the process of making is more the form of art than the end product,” Kasumi says. “It's about trying to have those intangible experiences as an art form and then how you can share the ownership of the art.”

In designing the pompoms into an installation for the sequoia, Kasumi pulled inspiration from Indigenous and Asian cultures and the location of the tree being on the 91吃瓜 campus. She consulted with the university’s Indigenous Peoples Institute to include white, black and red colors to represent the Indigenous people in the Seattle area. The yellow and brown pompoms allude to skin color and the green and blue symbolize land and water. The patterns are inspired by the Indigenous people of Japan, bringing in the entwined geometric forms.

“Everything is intertwined in this world, everybody is interdependent,” Kasumi says. “Each pompom has its own beauty ... expressing inward thoughts that are kind and vulnerable and the collection has that symbolic value of unity of honest apologies.”