Chiura Obata : an American modern / ShiPu Wang ; with contributions by Masuji Fujii, Asako Katsura, and Greg Robinson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wang, ShiPu, author.

Contributor:

Fujii, Masuji, contributor.

Katsura, Asako, contributor.

Robinson, Greg, 1966- contributor.

Language:

English

Japanese

Subjects (All):

Obata, Chiura--Exhibitions.

Obata, Chiura.

Japanese American artists--Exhibitions.

Japanese American artists.

Genre:

Exhibition catalogs.

Physical Description:

192 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 25 x 29 cm

Place of Publication:

Santa Barbara ; Oakland, California : Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California in association with University of California Press, [2018]

Language Note:

Text in English followed by Japanese text.

Summary:

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. Published in association with the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara. 00Exhibition: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, USA (13.01-29.04.2018); Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, USA (25.05-02.09.2018); Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan (18.01-10.03.2019); Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, USA (23.06-29.09.2019).

Contents:

Chiura Obata: American illustrator / Greg Robinson

Obata's pictorial cosmopolitanism in Lake Basin in the High Sierra and Mother Earth / Asako Katsura

Moonlight over Topaz : picturing displacement in the Japanese American internment / ShiPu Wang

Plates

Writings by Chiura Obata

Excerpt of an oral history interview with Chiura Obata, 1965 / Masuji Fujii, Kimi Kodani Hill, and Akiko Shibagaki.

Notes:

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Chiura Obata: An American Modern, organized and presented by the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, January 13, 2018--Copyright page.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [154]-156).

ISBN:

9780520296541

0520296540

OCLC:

981170161