Object of the Week: Street

Located in the far northwest corner of the contiguous United States, Seattle is oriented more to the Pacific than to Europe, and many of its artists looked to Asia in shaping the region’s singular form of modernism. Some practiced sumi-e (ink painting) and calligraphy as pathways to abstraction; others discovered in Zen a model of self-knowledge and unmitigated expression; still others traveled to Japan and China and made contact with those cultures directly. Artists of Asian descent experienced, on balance, an inclusive artistic environment, despite facing discrimination within the larger community, most tragically during World War II.

Alongside Kamekichi Tokita, Paul Horiuchi, and Geoge Tsutakawa, Kenjiro Nomura was one of Seattle’s leading Japanese American artists. Together, their stories reflect the historical diversity of the Pacific Northwest and its artists, adding further depth to 20th-century American art. As Issei (first-generation Japanese American), Nomura was raised in a traditional Japanese family and educated in the arts and culture of his parentage. He immigrated with his family to the United States in 1907, at the age of eleven. When he was sixteen, his parents returned home, but he stayed on and settled in Seattle to build a successful business and career as an artist.

A self-described “Sunday painter” with little formal training, he specialized in the realist style and vernacular subject matter associated with 1930s American Scene painting. Street, with its formal clarity and unmistakable awareness of place, is typical of his regionalism. Yet, even as he mastered this decidedly Western approach, he also maintained expertise in traditional Japanese painting, whose conventions of color, composition, and line inspired him to approach nature intuitively and on his terms.

Street immortalizes the busy intersection of Fourth Avenue and Yesler Way, the epicenter of Seattle’s thriving Japanese American community during the 1920s and 1930s. Here, Nomura launched Noto Sign Co., a signage manufacturer and popular gathering place for artists, and the headquarters from which he and his business partner, Tokita, established themselves on the local exhibition circuit.

In 1933, Nomura exhibited Street at the Seattle Art Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Northwest Artists and with it secured the prestigious Katherine B. Baker Award and a place in the permanent collection of the newly formed museum. When SAM officially opened its doors that same year, it was with a solo exhibition of Nomura’s work. His success, however, was cut short with the Great Depression and resulting forced closure of Noto Sign Co. During World War II, anti-Japanese sentiment and hostility led to his forced internment at the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. When he returned to Seattle three years later, it was to continued discrimination and limited opportunities for Japanese Americans. Yet, Nomura continued to paint and participate in Seattle’s mid-20th-century cultural scene, sharing common cause with his fellow Northwest Modernists.

Nomura’s work is on view at SAM in the exhibition Northwest Modernism: Four Japanese Americans, and at the Cascadia Art Museum in the major retrospective, Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey.

– Theresa Papanikolas, Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art

Image: Street, ca. 1932, Kenjiro Nomura, Oil on canvas, 23 3/4 x 28 3/4 in., Gift of West Seattle Art Club, Katherine B. Baker Memorial Purchase Award, 33.225.

Muse/News: Issei & Nisei Art, Breakthrough Moments, and Lightweight Minimalism

SAM News

Japanese-language site Jungle City highlights Northwest Modernism at SAM, an installation featuring work by four legendary Japanese American artists of Seattle: Kenjiro Nomura, Kamekichi Tokita, Paul Horiuchi, and George Tsutakawa.

Architectural Digest includes the Olympic Sculpture Park on their list of the “6 Best Public Sculpture Parks to Visit This Spring and Summer.”

Nicole Pasia for the Seattle Times with recommendations for celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, including the reopening of the Seattle Asian Art Museum on May 28.

Local News

“Part satire, part pop art hallucination”: Seattle Met’s Stefan Milne on MS PAM, the street-level expansion of Martyr Sauce, Tariqa Waters’s Pioneer Square gallery.

The Stranger’s Jasmyne Keimig reports on Murmurations, a collaboration of six cultural institutions—Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, On the Boards, Northwest Film Forum, Frye Art Museum, and Velocity Dance Center—with projects happening all summer.

Also in the Stranger: Chase Burns on the breakthrough moment for artist Drie Chapek, whose paintings and collages are now on view at the Greg Kucera Gallery.

“The breakthrough moment happened after Chapek picked up painting again in 2016, when a gallerist who presented her work in Edison, Washington, suggested she talk to the gallerist’s friend in Seattle named Greg. That Greg was Greg Kucera. When Kucera came to Chapek’s studio, “He was like, ‘Why haven’t you ever contacted me?’” She broke out laughing as she told the story. “I was like, ‘Check your email, dude.’”

Inter/National News

“Who doesn’t love a great find?” asks Menachem Wecker for Artnet, as he ranks seven of the greatest lost-art discoveries.

Jenna Wortham for the New York Times Magazine on the “glamour in the quotidian” of Deana Lawson’s photographs of Black people.

Alex Greenberger for Art in America on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “lightweight minimalism.”

“Amid it all is an acute sense of loss, though it’s intentionally ambiguous who—or what—is no longer present. How viewers make sense of it all depends on their knowledge of world history and Gonzalez-Torres’s biography, as well as their own identity.”

And Finally

Best friends reunite, visit anthropomorphic deer statues, and talk.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Nina Dubinsky

SAM Art: SNOW on Wednesday!

Today’s SAMart was going to focus on Robert Morris’ Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, the topic of curator Catharina Manchanda’s lecture on Wednesday. However, given the forecast for a storm, SAM’s 3 sites will be closed Wednesday, January 18. This lecture will now take place on Wednesday, July 11.

Stay warm, stay safe, and enjoy the snow!

Trail in the Snow, 1959, Paul Horiuchi, American, 1906-1999, casein on paper, 34 7/8 x 22 15/16 in., Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection, 60.58, © Estate of Paul Horiuchi. On view until mid-February at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, Volunteer Park.
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