Chiura Obata
Subtitle: an American modern
By: ShiPu Wang ; with contributions by Masuji Fujii, Asako Katsura, and Greg Robinson
Contributors: Fujii, Masuji, contributor; Katsura, Asako, contributor; Robinson, Greg, 1966- contributor
Publisher: Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California in association with University of California Press
Published: 2018
Language: eng; jpn
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780520296541
Subjects: Japanese American artists; Exhibitions
Description: 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. Exhibition: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara (13.01-29.04.2018); Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (25.05-02.09.2018); Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan (18.01-10.03.2019); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (23.06-29.09.2019); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (Nov 2019-April 2020).
Notes: Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, January 13-April 29, 2018 ; and at four other venues thru April 2020.

Includes bibliographical references.

In English and Japanese.
Table of contents: title: Chiura Obata: American illustrator / Greg Robinson; title: Obata's pictorial cosmopolitanism in Lake Basin in the High Sierra and Mother Earth / Asako Katsura; title: Moonlight over topaz : picturing displacement in the Japanese American internment / ShiPu Wang; title: Plates; title: Writings by Chiura Obata; title: Excerpt of an oral history interview with Chiura Obata, 1965 / Masuji Fujii, Kimi Kodani Hill, and Akiko Shibagaki.