Tomoo Hamada

Tomoo Hamada was born in 1967 in Mashiko, Japan, as the second son of Shinsaku Hamada and a grandson of Shoji Hamada. In 1989 and 1991, Hamada received undergraduate and graduate degrees in sculpture from Tama Art University in Tokyo. Tomoo Hamada has exhibited, lectured, and given workshops internationally and was integral in helping the pottery community of Mashiko rebuild from the devastating Tohoku earthquake of 2011. He organized the Shoji Hamada climbing kiln project (2015 and 2018) with potters from Mashiko and Kasama and fired Hamada’s eight chamber climbing kiln after it was restored from earthquake damage. He was the chair for the Mashiko & St. Ives Centenary Project celebrating the founding of Leach Pottery by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada in 1920 (signpost were erected in Mashiko in 2021 and St. Ives in 2022). His ceramic works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Mashiko Museum of Ceramic Art, the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, and the Embassy of Japan in the UK. He currently lives in Mashiko on the original compound his grandfather built. In 2012, he became Director of the Shoji Hamada Memorial Mashiko Sankokan Museum.