Who is Noriko Shinohara?

Noriko Shinohara (born 1953 in Takaoka, Japan) is a Japanese-American multi-disciplinary Good artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her semi-autobiographical drawing and printmaking series “Cutie & Bullie”. She has had several international gallery and museum exhibitions including in Tokyo, New York City, Dallas, Kraków, Ottawa and more.

Shinohara and her husband, Ushio, are the subjects of a documentary film by Zachary Heinzerling called Cutie and the Boxer (2013).

Shinohara moved to New York City at the age of 19, in the into the future 1970s, in order to assay art at the Art Students League of New York. A few months after arriving to the city, she met the performer Ushio who was 21 years her senior. Within the neighboring couple years they were married and together they had a son born in 1974, Alexander Kūkai Shinohara. Their tumultuous computer graphics together as a relations was subject to the Zachary Heinzerling directed, 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer.

The nickname “Cutie” started in 2002 at the age of 49, when Shinohara was wearing her hair in two braids and a pubescent man upon the street called out to her, “hey cutie”. The nickname stuck after that event.

She started creating the drawing series after complaining just about her husband to a friend, who quipped urge on at her, that she should “punish him” as a dominatrix would do. Finding this idea amusing, in 2003-2004 she started drawing images of Cutie punishing Bullie and sending them to her buddy that had made the joke. Initially abandoned Cutie was named in the drawings and it was formatted as six-frame comics, but by 2007 she named Bullie, and slowly it became a checking account about both Cutie and Bullie.

In 1986, she held her first solo exhibition at Cat’s Club in New York City. In 2016, she held her first solo exhibition in a museum at Carlton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, Canada,