Norie Sato (b. 1949) was born in northern Japan and moved to the United States at age four with her family. She moved to Seattle in 1972 and studied at the University of Washington, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking in 1974. Sato’s early work focused on printmaking, and she later incorporated glass and video elements as well. Sato said she wanted her art to combine different mediums in order to draw attention to things that are usually ignored or hidden. Sato has also worked as a public artist, creating works for King County facilities, the Seattle Justice Center, as well as working as the system artist for Link Light Rail from 1998-2009. Sato also served on the Seattle Design Council, Seattle Arts Commission, and co-founded the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) in 1980.

This image shows Sato working on a temporary exhibition at Pier 50, where her family arrived in the US during their original emigration. By 1991, when Sato created the work, the original pier was gone, but her work, called Transience of Memory, was installed over the railing at the waterfront near Yesler and Alaskan Ways, close to the pier's old location. The piece consists of four wire-mesh screens with images sewn into them. One of the screens, seen here, shows the Hikara Maru, the ship that carried the Sato family, and the others depict luggage from the journey, the Seattle skyline, and a pair of wings.

Caption information source: “Sato, Norie (b. 1949)” by Zola Mumford, HistoryLink, retrieved from https://www.historylink.org/File/10941
Caption information source: “Seattle goes ‘public’”, by Regina Hackett, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 27, 1991, page C1.