As a young teen, he spent his time in Little Tokyo drawing alone in cafes. The multicultural landscape of Los Angeles provided Kaino with a backdrop to explore his heritage as a third-generation Japanese American. His grandfather, Akira Shirahashi, was a football player in high school and was preparing to attend Occidental College when he was sent to the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. Kaino’s grandfather and grandmother met at the internment camp and moved to Los Angeles once they were released, opening a corner store called Aki’s Market.

Much of Kaino’s work looks to collaboration and storytelling to drive his means of production. With a personal history rooted in issues of social justice in the United States, Kaino often draws connections between historical events and forms of cultural production to create work that exposes the poetics embedded in the act of making.

Kaino received his BA from the University of California Irvine in 1993 and his MFA from the University of California San Diego in 1996. His work has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the group exhibition Black Belt (2004), as well as the solo exhibition Glenn Kaino: 19.83 (2014). He has held solo exhibitions at institutions nationally, including the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas; and MASS MoCA, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His work is in the public collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Studio Museum in Harlem acquired his work in 2012.