Bøger af Barbara Johns

"Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist's Journey features the Japanese American artist's work throughout his life from his early works focusing on Seattle's urban environment and rural Northwest landscapes, to paintings and drawings capturing his life in World War II internment camps, and post-war abstractions fully demonstrating Nomura's artistic stylistic and professional growth. Born in Japan in 1896, Kenjiro Nomura came to the United States with his parents at the age of ten. On his own by sixteen, painting became a constant throughout his life as he experienced not only major artistic recognition but also business success and failure, racism and wartime incarceration, and, at last, American citizenship. The peak of his artistic success was the 1930s, when his paintings represented the Northwest in New York, Washington, DC, and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Incarcerated during World War II along with 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, he continued to paint, leaving a record of his experience in more than one hundred paintings and drawings from his time in the Puyallup detention facility and Minidoka confinement camp. Despite crippling challenges after World War II including the suicide of his wife, he resumed painting, developed a new abstract artistic style, and once again gained recognition--the only one of his prewar colleagues to do so. He fulfilled a long-held goal to become a citizen after a federal law barring citizenship to Asian immigrants was voided." -- from Cascadia Art Museum.

Contextualizes Tokita's paintings and diary within the art community and Japanese America

Takuichi Fujii (1891ΓÇô1964) left Japan in 1906 to make his home in Seattle, where he established a business, started a family, and began his artistic practice. When war broke out between the United States and Japan, he and his family were incarcerated along with the more than 100,000 ethnic Japanese located on the West Coast. Sent to detention camps at Puyallup, Washington, and then Minidoka in Idaho, Fujii documented his daily experiences in words and art. The Hope of Another Spring reveals the rare find of a large and heretofore unknown collection of art produced during World War II. The centerpiece of the collection is FujiiΓÇÖs illustrated diary that historian Roger Daniels has called ΓÇ£the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration.ΓÇ¥Barbara Johns presents Takuichi FujiiΓÇÖs life story and his artistic achievements within the social and political context of the time. Sandy Kita, the artistΓÇÖs grandson, provides translations and an introduction to the diary. The Hope of Another Spring is a significant contribution to Asian American studies, American and regional history, and art history.