Taho was born in 1950 in
Tokushima Prefecture. In 1987, an installation of hers was commissioned by the
Brattleboro Museum and Art Center for their New Work Japan exhibition. In 1988, she set up
Forbidden Building, an installation where she invited others to collect dead leaves to fill a large structure of
chain-link fence and
scaffolding nearby
Ruggles station. She once worked with
Jeffrey Spalding for the 1989 installation work
Eye of Nature II. In 1989, Taho moved to the Department of Architecture of the nearby
MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where she was assistant professor of visual arts and an Ida Green Career Development Professor. In 1991, she did an installation at the
Massachusetts College of Art, named
On the Path, where she "links her Japanese father's enslavement to the
Emperor with the
slavery of the American South". In 1993, she was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellow for sculpting, as well as a
Bunting Institute Fellowship. In 1994, her installation
Multicultural Diplomats, where 40,000 inflated
medical gloves, containing pieces of paper with the dreams of other people who wrote them down at her request, would be hung from the
Margaret Mitchell House and Museum, was exhibited at the Arts Festival of Atlanta. On 17 September,
Multicultural Diplomats was destroyed, alongside a majority of the building, when an arsonist ignited a fire by spilling
kerosene across all three floors above ground. In 1995, she was promoted to associate professor at MIT.
Artforum said that her 1995 exhibition
Dawn: Transformation of Zero at
Capp Street Project "examined our complex relationship with money". In 1996, she held an installation where
Cambridge residents (reportedly including
homeless people) would anonymously have their dreams engraved on her
Dream Towers sculpture, with
The Boston Globe calling her the city's "dream collector". In 2001, she organized an installation where pedestrians near an
Amherst garage would read poetry, including from Amherst native
Emily Dickinson. She later moved to the
Tokyo University of the Arts Department of Intermedia and became a professor there. She won an
Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2000. she resided in
Boston. ==References==