Helen Oji
Year of the Ox - Study for ACV Calendar #2, 1984
Gouache on paper
24 x 21 1/2 inches (60.96 x 54.61 cm)

Courtesy of artist - Helen Oji

Selected by Anna Lee

Helen Oji is a New York–based artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking, works on paper, and sculpture. Born in Sacramento, California, Oji draws from Japanese heritage and American and European artistic traditions, exploring gesture, color, form, materiality, and cultural memory. Her work moves between abstraction and figuration, often using expressive lines and fluid forms to investigate the relationship between the body, nature, and visual language.

Oji received her graduate education in California in the early 1970s and began exhibiting in New York soon afterward. In May 1980, The Drawing Center presented her work in 62 Drawings by 12 Artists, an exhibition featuring Oji alongside eleven emerging artists. She was also an early member of GODZILLA: Asian American Art Network, a pioneering collective that brought greater visibility to Asian American artists in New York. During the 1980s and 1990s, her work was represented by Monique Knowlton Gallery in New York.

In 1984, Oji created Year of the Ox, one of three gouache studies for a calendar commissioned by Asian CineVision. In recent years, she has extended her exploration of the Asian Zodiac into hand-needle-felted wool sculptures of Zodiac animals.

Oji’s work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, and other institutions. In 2025, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art acquired her 1981 work Swarming Bees. Her papers spanning more than five decades are archived at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She also collaborates with her daughter, artist and writer Yoko Oji Kikuchi; their installation Mothership: Stellar Nursery was commissioned for Kate Haug’s Collaborative Practices and installed in the summer of 2026 at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts.