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Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was one of the most significant Japanese
American artists working on the West Coast in the last century.
Born in Okayama, Japan, Obata emigrated to the United States in
1903 and embarked on a seven-decade career that saw the enactment
of anti-immigration laws and the mass incarceration of Japanese
Americans during World War II. But Obata emerged as a leading
figure in the Northern California artistic communities, serving not
only as an influential art professor at UC Berkeley for nearly
twenty years, but also as a founding director of art schools in the
internment camps. With a prodigious and expansive oeuvre, Obata's
seemingly effortless mastery of, and productive engagement with,
diverse techniques, styles, and traditions defy the dichotomous
categorizations of American/European and Japanese/Asian art. His
faith in the power of art, his devotion to preserving the myriad
grandeur of what he called "Great Nature," and his compelling
personal story as an immigrant and an American are all as relevant
to our contemporary moment as ever. This catalogue is the first
book surveying Chiura Obata's rich and varied body of work that
include over 100 beautiful images, many of which have never been
published. It also showcases a selection of Obata's writings and a
rare 1965 interview with the artist. The scholarly essays by ShiPu
Wang and the other contributors illuminate the intense and
productive cross-cultural negotiations that Obata's life and work
exemplify, in the context of both American modernism and the early
twentieth-century U.S. racio-ethnic relations-a still-understudied
area in American art historical scholarship. Published in
association with the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa
Barbara. Exhibition dates: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC
Santa Barbara: January 13-April 29, 2018 Utah Museum of Fine Arts,
Salt Lake City: May 25-September 2, 2018 Okayama Prefectural Museum
of Art, Okayama, Japan: January 18-March 10, 2019 Crocker Art
Museum, Sacramento: June 23-September 29, 2019
An in-depth look at the transformative influence of Mexican artists
on their U.S. counterparts during a period of social change The
first half of the 20th century saw prolific cultural exchange
between the United States and Mexico, as artists and intellectuals
traversed the countries' shared border in both directions. For U.S.
artists, Mexico's monumental public murals portraying social and
political subject matter offered an alternative aesthetic at a time
when artists were seeking to connect with a public deeply affected
by the Great Depression. The Mexican influence grew as the artists
Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros
traveled to the United States to exhibit, sell their work, and make
large-scale murals, working side-by-side with local artists, who
often served as their assistants, and teaching them the fresco
technique. Vida Americana examines the impact of their work on more
than 70 artists, including Marion Greenwood, Philip Guston, Isamu
Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Charles White. It provides a new
understanding of art history, one that acknowledges the
wide-ranging and profound influence the Mexican muralists had on
the style, subject matter, and ideology of art in the United States
between 1925 and 1945. Published in association with the Whitney
Museum of American Art Exhibition Schedule: Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York (February 17-May 17, 2020) McNay Art Museum,
San Antonio (June 25-October 4, 2020)
In The Other American Moderns, ShiPu Wang analyzes the works of
four early twentieth-century American artists who engaged with the
concept of “Americanness”: Frank Matsura, Eitarō Ishigaki,
Hideo Noda, and Miki Hayakawa. In so doing, he recasts notions of
minority artists’ contributions to modernism and American
culture. Wang presents comparative studies of these four artists’
figurative works that feature Native Americans, African Americans,
and other racial and ethnic minorities, including Matsura and Susan
Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), The Bonus March (1932),
Scottsboro Boys (1933), and Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926). Rather
than creating art that reflected “Asian aesthetics,” Matsura,
Ishigaki, Noda, and Hayakawa deployed “imagery of the Other by
the Other” as their means of exploring, understanding, and
contesting conditions of diaspora and notions of what it meant to
be American in an age of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation.
Based on a decade-long excavation of previously unexamined
collections in the United States and Japan, The Other American
Moderns is more than a rediscovery of “forgotten” minority
artists: it reconceives American modernism by illuminating these
artists’ active role in the shaping of a multicultural and
cosmopolitan culture. This nuanced analysis of their deliberate
engagement with the ideological complexities of American identity
contributes a new vision to our understanding of non-European
identity in modernism and American art.
"A few short days has changed my status in this country, although I
myself have not changed at all." On December 8, 1941, artist Yasuo
Kuniyoshi (1889-1953) awoke to find himself branded an "enemy
alien" by the U.S. government in the aftermath of Japan's attack on
Pearl Harbor. The historical crisis forced Kuniyoshi, an emigre
Japanese with a distinguished career in American art, to rethink
his pictorial strategies and to confront questions of loyalty,
assimilation, national and racial identity that he had carefully
avoided in his prewar art. As an immigrant who had proclaimed
himself to be as "American as the next fellow," the realization of
his now fractured and precarious status catalyzed the development
of an emphatic and conscious identity construct that would underlie
Kuniyoshi's art and public image for the remainder of his life.
Drawing on previously unexamined primary sources, Becoming
American? is the first scholarly book in over two decades to offer
an in-depth and critical analysis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi's pivotal
works, including his "anti-Japan" posters and radio broadcasts for
U.S. propaganda, and his coded and increasingly enigmatic
paintings, within their historical contexts. Through the prism of
an identity crisis, the book examines Kuniyoshi's imagery and
writings as vital means for him to engage, albeit often reluctantly
and ambivalently, in discussions about American democracy and
ideals at a time when racial and national origins were grounds for
mass incarceration and discrimination. It is also among the first
scholarly studies to investigate the activities of Americans of
Japanese descent outside the internment camps and the intense
pressures with which they had to deal in the aftermath of Pearl
Harbor. As an art historical book, Becoming American? foregrounds
broader historical debates of what constituted American art, a
central preoccupation of Kuniyoshi's artistic milieu. It
illuminates the complicating factors of race, diasporas, and
ideology in the construction of an American cultural identity.
Timely and provocative, the book historicizes and elucidates the
ways in which "minority" artists have been, and continue to be,
both championed and marginalized for their cultural and ethnic
"difference" within the twentieth-century American art canon.
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