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A/P/A Institute Artist-In-Residence 2012-2013 Roger Shimomura

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A/P/A Institute Artist-In-Residence 2012-2013 Roger Shimomura Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU 7-8 Washington Mews New York, NY 10003 ROGER SHIMOMURA A/P/A Institute Artist-in-Residence 2012-2013 2012-2013 Artist-in-Residence Events and Exhibitions A/P/A Artist-in-residence Welcome Featuring roger shimomura with Michael ray charles Moderated by Arlene davila Wednesday, september 19, 2012, 7:30-9PM NYU casa Italiana 24 West 12th street, New York, NY 10011 The Artist and the Archive Featuring roger shimomura and Keiko Wright AIrPlANe ANd soUP cAN Moderated by G.W. Kimura Handmade model airplane, circa 1945, dIcK TrAcY Advertising miniature campbell soup can, circa 1960 Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 6-8PM book on chester Gould, artist of dick Tracy, circa 1970s Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU 7-8 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003 Prints of Pop (& War) A/P/A Gallery Inaugural exhibition opening Wednesday, February 13, 2013, 6-9PM reception: 6-9PM Artist talk: 7-8PM Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU PoPeYe cHAlkware GrANdMA’s dIArY carnival prize, circa 1940’s 7-8 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003 circa 1912-1968 For more information and to RSVP, please visit www.apa.nyu/events, email [email protected], or call 212.992.9653. Asian/Pacific/American Institute www.apa.nyu.edu The A/P/A Institute brings together accomplished scholars, community builders, and artists from New York City and UKIYo PrINT beyond in interactive forums, reflection, and new research. bAbe rUTH PIN close up, circa unknown babe ruth scorekeeper, circa 1930s oger Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theatre pieces address sociopolitical Artist’s Statement issues of ethnicity. He was born in Seattle, Washington and spent two years of his I was born in Seattle, Washington and have been living in Lawrence, Kansas since Rearly childhood in Minidoka (Idaho), one of ten concentration camps for Japanese 1969, retiring in 2004 as Distinguished Professor of Art Emeritus. My wife, the artist Americans during World War II. Janet Davidson-Hues, and I built and live in a 5,000 square foot house/studio in Lawrence, and we also maintain residences in Seattle and New York City. Shimomura received a B.A. degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 135 solo exhibitions I am honored to be selected Artist-in-Residence for the A/P/A Institute for the 2012- of paintings and prints, and has presented his experimental theatre pieces at such 2013 academic year. As a full-time artist and former artist-educator, I look forward to venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and sharing my experiences with the larger community of A/PA supporters. Equally The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of more than 30 challenging will be the special opportunity to inaugurate the exhibition space in the grants, of which four are National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and A/P/A Institute’s new permanent home on the Washington Mews. For this occasion I Performance Art. Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lecturer on his work at am planning a mini-retrospective exhibition of my screen prints and lithographs with more than 200 universities, art schools, and museums across the country. He is the a special twist that I hope will enrich the understanding of the works on display. As a recipient of awards from the College Art Association, Seattle Urban League, Kansas lifelong collector of Americana, it was inevitable that the images of many of these Governor’s Office, Asian American Arts Alliance, University of Washington and, in objects would work their way into my paintings, prints, and performances. I will start 2011, was designated a United States Artist Fellow. by selecting sample prints from the various themes that I have worked on since the late 1960s. Alongside each print, I will situate a two- or three-dimensional object(s) Shimomura began teaching at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas in 1969. In that was inspirational or related to the genesis of the print concept. Hopefully this the fall of 1990, Shimomura held an appointment as the Dayton Hudson arrangement will encourage opportunities for some fresh and interesting dialogue on Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College, Northfield, popular culture and its interaction with the fine arts. Minnesota. During his teaching career at the University of Kansas he was the first faculty I look forward to the events this year and the opportunities to share some experiences member in the School of Fine Arts ever to be gained from a long career in the studio and classroom. designated a University Distinguished Professor (1994). He also received the Higuchi Research Prize (1998) and the Chancellors Club Career Teaching Award (2002). In 2004 he retired Excerpted from The Prints of Roger Shimomura by Emily Stamey from teaching and started the Shimomura (University of Washington Press, 2007) Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to foster faculty research in the best known as a painter and theatre artist, roger shimomura explores his Japanese American Department of Art. identity through a vibrant and provocative stylistic combination of twentieth-century American Pop art and traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints. Although the Shimomura is in the permanent collections literature on shimomura never fails to mention his appropriation of Japanese prints, it often ignores of over 85 museums nationwide. His the artist’s own works on paper. reviews of specific exhibitions tend to consider shimomura’s prints personal papers and letters are being carefully, but discussions of his work as a whole rarely make them the subject of sustained analysis. collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Whether working on canvas or paper, shimomura uses the same visual vocabulary. one finds DC. He is represented by the elements gleaned from other artists: Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits and roy lichtenstein’s Flomenhaft Gallery, New York City, benday-dot brush strokes; comic-book heroes including Mickey Mouse, superman, and dick Tracy; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Eight and the Kabuki actors, courtesans, and silhouettes of Mt. Fuji found in traditional Japanese prints. Modern Gallery, Santa Fe, and one also discovers shimomura’s own signature depictions of American and Japanese fighter planes; Byron C. Cohen Gallery, Kansas dividing structures such as barbed wire, brick walls, and shoji screens; and domestic items, including City. rice cookers and tubes of lipstick. A study of the consistent use of these images in both the paintings and prints, regardless of medium, reveals the artist’s investment in this complex personal photo of the artist iconography of popular images and ordinary objects. even in this melting pot of Protestants, Catholics, Jews. Life was made more complicated by their dad’s war stories of “commies” in Korea or the Saturday Director’s Statement afternoon airings of Charlie Chan with bug-eyed comic relief sidekick Mantan ROGER SHIMoreland.MOMURA Refusing the Meaning of Things: Shimomura’s Alchemy To collect artifacts from this storyscape is an act of defiance. It’s to gain power over their conventional stereotypic associations, and to challenge their power-laden meanings. These masks assembled together enable all us hauntees, from our various experiential locations, to detoxify. This is the power and eloquence of Roger Shimomura’s creative vision. Things haunt Roger also. But through his righteous paintbrush, the buck-teeth, the squint, the bow, the moustache, the kimono, the thousands of tsotchke-fied racist gestures out there have been transmuted into powerful vaccinations. Through his anti-bodied paintings, we get immunized. The A/P/A Institute is honored to have Roger Shimomura inaugurate our new space on the Washington Mews. He is a pioneering artist who shares our commitments. Decade-after-decade, he’s been unpacking and re-constructing what’s happened in that thingified landscape of the American dreamscape while also hallengingc those Masks, papier-mache with hair, painted cloth, painted plastic, or rubber thousand-and-one racial slights. Like a great alchemist, he turns dross into something roger shimomura collection, Wing luke Museum invaluable. Things haunt us. Like these masks. Just about any mask, but these in particular. With Roger, these cruel childhood tortures have a cure! Doctor S is in the house. Why!? —Jack Tchen Halloween time. I grew up with kids wearing those grotesques, walking the sidewalks of our prairieland on the outskirts of Chicago. Park Forest was a model post-Korean War suburb where those considered hyphenated ethnics, with names like Marzano or Gapinski or Schlossberg, moved – away from their urban ethnic neighborhoods. Here they became 100% American. We had one of the first outdoor shopping malls. I grew up in a “Cape Cod” tract house that was like all the other houses on Central Park (without the park). Nothing fancy by today’s standards or even then, but during the era of racial covenants this ‘burb was different for two reasons most of us didn’t quite realize. In a time when immigration laws privileged the imagined “Nordic” race over Eastern and Southern Europeans, this was a place returning ethnic and working class GIs could afford to start a family. And it was developed by Jewish builders. A group of young professional Chinese immigrants asked for permission to move in. No Blacks yet. Racial otherness has always been layered. It wasn’t the masks so much, but the older kids who wore them. In this Dream “shimomura crossing the delaware” America, the ritual of whiteness was enacted through these objects – designed in the 2010, Acrylic on canvas U.S.A., “Made in Japan,” and animated by wisecracks.
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