Betty Nobue Kano

Last updated

Betty Nobue Kano (born in 1944) is a Japanese painter, curator and lecturer at San Francisco State University and New College of California, teaching the 332 Japanese American Art and Literature class. She is notable for exhibiting her work in nearly 200 regional, national and international galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. [1]

Contents

The paintings of Betty were distinguished by graffiti and handwriting submerged beneath layers of radiant, transparent color. [2] In the late 1970s, she began to explore the interaction of more solid colour shapes. Some of her famous artworks are Women Artists of Color: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook to 20th Century Artists in the Americas; Black Velvet, the Art We Love to Hate; International Review of African American Art etc. One of the most famous artwork is Tomorrow's Garden (2009). The artwork is different from her previous artworks, as the painting - Tomorrow's Garden tried to stop using plastics.

She is the co-founder of Art Against Apartheid, Asian American Women Artists Association and Women of Color Camp. She received a Rockefeller Foundation Residency Fellowship in the Humanities and the “Sisters of Fire” Award by Women of Color Resource Center. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from UC Berkeley. [3]

Biography

Betty Nobue Kano was born in Sendai, Japan in 1944. She emigrated to the United States and got her B.A. degree in Fine Arts and Painting from San Francisco State College in 1967 and her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California, Berkeley. She co-founded the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) in 1989 and is a lecturer at San Francisco State University. [4]

Kano also involved in different community like Sansei Legacy Project which discuss the long term impacts of the Japanese-American internment experience on sansei (third-generation American of Japanese descent). [5] Moreover, she has several responsibilities and positions like advisory board in Japanese American National Library and Board of Directors of Japanese American Women Alumnae of UC Berkeley.

Career

Apart from being an artist, Betty has involved in s sum of jobs related to her art life. The Education department of Oakland Museum of Art also hired her to be the consultant in the beginning of the 1990s. Starting from 1993, she taught lectures in the art department in some California universities, for example, the Laney College and San Francisco State University. Moreover, she has been the art curator for Roots in Asia, Public and Private Journey, The Mythmakers and so forth.

Education

Administration and activism

Betty was deeply affected by the free speech movement in 1964. The idea spread through her college. Students started to have a sense of being a critical part that affects the world. She became radical and got arrested for a couple times in the movement. In 1988, when Betty realized in a women's artist conference held in San Francisco that there were only four Asian American artists out of 800 artists, she decided to speak up by establishing the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA). At that time, Asian American artists were excluded from many exhibitions and galleries. There were no representatives for them until the foundation of the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA).

Publications

Honors, awards and grants

2011: Community Leadership Award, National Japanese American Historical Society [6]

2009: California State Senate Certificate of Recognition, Founding Member of Asian American Women Artists Association [6]

2002: Sisters of Fire Award, Women of Color Resource Center [6]

1991: Rockefeller Foundation Residency Fellowship in the Humanities, Asian American Center, Queens College, New York [6]

1981, 1982: Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Finalist [6]

1977: Exhibition Award, San Francisco Arts Festival [6]

Related Research Articles

Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) is a nonprofit arts organization that supports and promotes the work of Asian American women artists in the visual, literary, and performing arts through activities such as art events, lectures, artists salons, and member exhibitions.

Joan Brown

Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

Helen Hyde

Helen Hyde was an American etcher and engraver. She is best known for her color etching process and woodblock prints reflecting Japanese women and children characterizations.

Chiura Obata

Chiura Obata was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent a year in an internment camp. He nevertheless emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California art scene and as an influential educator, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly twenty years and acting as founding director of art school at the Topaz internment camp. After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.

Squeak Carnwath is a contemporary American painter and arts educator. She is a Professor Emerita of Art at University of California, Berkeley.

Alice Brown Chittenden American painter

Alice Brown Chittenden was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art from 1897 to 1941.

Lenore Chinn is an American artist best known for her American realist paintings and her queer activism. Chinn was a founding member of Lesbians in the Visual Arts and Queer Cultural Center (QCC) and served on the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. She is currently based in San Francisco, California.

M. Evelyn McCormick


Mary Evelyn McCormick was an American Impressionist who lived and worked around San Francisco and Monterey, California at the turn of the 20th century.

Betty Guy American painter

Betty Guy was an American artist, most notable for her work in watercolor landscapes.

Bernice Bing (1936–1998) was a Chinese American lesbian artist involved in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene in the 1960s. She was known for her interest in the Beats and Zen Buddhism, and for the "calligraphy-inspired abstraction" in her paintings, which she adopted after studying with Saburo Hasegawa.

Flo Oy Wong is a Chinese-American artist. Born in Oakland, California, Wong was granted a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, qualifying as a teacher at California State University, Hayward a year later. Her intent was initially to teach high school students, but she found that it was more enjoyable to teach small children, and focused on a career doing that; this ended when she had her own children and left the teaching profession.

Kim Anno is a Japanese-American abstract painter. Born in Los Angeles, California to Japanese-Polish and Native American-Irish parents, respectively, she studied at San Francisco State University, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1982. She was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1985 from the San Francisco Art Institute. Anno began working at the California College of the Arts in 1996 as an associate professor, and was chair of the painting department as of 2012.

Hisako Hibi

Hisako Shimizu Hibi (1907–1991) was a Japanese-born American Issei painter and printmaker who exhibited throughout her career, and by the end of her life she was well entrenched in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community.

Helen Katharine Forbes American painter

Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration (WPA). Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.

Gertrude Partington Albright British-American painter

Gertrude Partington Albright was a British-born American artist known for portrait etchings and her Cubism-influenced California landscapes. She taught at the California School of Fine Arts for nearly thirty years.

Cindy Shih is a visual artist living and working in San Francisco. Her work is strongly rooted in traditional techniques and principles, including Chinese literati painting, Venetian plasterwork, landscape painting, and realism, although producing thoroughly modern pieces. One of her prominent themes is exploring her personal narrative in a broad context.

Eva Joseph Goldsheid was a German-born American artist and educator, known as painter, and printmaker.

Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.

Emiko Nakano (1925–1990) was an American abstract expressionist painter, printmaker, fiber artist, and fashion Illustrator.

Judy Shintani is a Japanese American artist whose work focuses on storytelling and remembrance of people who were imprisoned, her initial focus being Japanese American's incarcerated during World War II. Through the use of sculpture and installations Shintani creates interactive displays to try and shine light on historical issues and create a space of transformation and healing along with teaching history through portraying personal experiences.

References

  1. ↑ "Betty Kano | Asian American Women Artists Association". aawaa.net. Archived from the original on 2016-04-02. Retrieved 2016-03-27.
  2. ↑ Albright, Thomas (1985-01-01). Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History. University of California Press. ISBN   9780520051935.
  3. ↑ "Betty Nobue Kano | An Idea Called Tomorrow". anideacalledtomorrow.wordpress.com. Retrieved 2016-03-27.
  4. ↑ Betty Nobue Kano Asian American Art and Activism. (2016). YouTube. Retrieved 20 March 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9osV2X2vuM
  5. ↑ Sansei Legacy Project Home. (2016). Momomedia.com. Retrieved 20 March 2016, from http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/sansei/home.htm
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Betty Kano | Asian American Women Artists Association. (2016). Aawaa.net. Retrieved 20 March 2016, from http://aawaa.net/artist-profile/betty-kano/ Archived 2016-04-02 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ↑ Kano, Betty (1993-01-01). "Four Northern California Artists: Hisako Hibi, Norine Nishimura, Yong Soon Min, and Miran Ahn". Feminist Studies. 19 (3): 628–642. doi:10.2307/3178104. JSTOR   3178104.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.