littlecakes is a pseudonym used by a Japanese artist based in the United States who began making AI-generated art in late 2021 or early 2022. Her collage-based work explores nostalgia and invented folklore in a self-described “sticky, messy, sweet” register that shifts into nightmarish and paranormal territory.
Working under her real name, she has exhibited or performed at venues ranging from a Mexican restaurant in Toronto and a sports bar in Boston to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and White Columns in New York. littlecakes has been a visiting lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Pratt Institute, and for several years ran a gallery out of her apartment that was reviewed in The New York Times. She also worked for more than ten years as the buyer and art director for a store and gallery in Tokyo before taking a hiatus from art to work with animals. Discovering the web3 community brought her back to art. Her earlier practice was craft-based, shaped by a jewelry and metalsmithing major in art school, and she began using AI to create still images in late 2021 or early 2022.
