Thomas Yamamoto

Last updated

Thomas Yamamoto (August 20, 1917 – December 19, 2004 [1] ) was an American artist.

Born in Japantown, San Francisco to two Issei , a tailor and a midwife from adjoining villages in Oita and Fukuoka Prefectures in Kyushu, Japan. Both of Yamamoto's parents were of Bushi heritage. Yamamoto was an Eagle Scout in troop 12 and attended Lowell High School, graduating in 1935. After starting in aeronautical engineering, Yamamoto switched to art at UC Berkeley graduating with a Masters of Art in 1941. This was before the advent of the Masters of Fine Art. His instructors included John Haley and Erle Loran, who worked with Hans Hofmann. To some degree they influenced his future work. He was Phi Beta Kappa.

Japantown, San Francisco Neighborhood in San Francisco, California, United States

Japantown is a neighborhood in the Western Addition district of San Francisco, California.

Issei Japanese people who were first to immigrate

Issei(一世, "first generation") is a Japanese-language term used by ethnic Japanese in countries in North America and South America to specify the Japanese people who were the first generation to immigrate there. Issei are born in Japan; their children born in the new country are Nisei ; and their grandchildren are Sansei.

Ōita Prefecture Prefecture of Japan

Ōita Prefecture is a prefecture on Kyushu region of Japan. The prefectural capital is the city of Ōita.

In the 1930s, Yamamoto was active in the art scene of the San Francisco Bay area until being incarcerated in May 1942. He was interned first at the Assembly Center in San Francisco, and was later moved to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. [2] While there, he contributed work to the camp magazine, Trek, along with Miné Okubo. He was released early due to the sponsorship of Takashi Ohta, an artist who housed him in his West Village home in New York City. While in New York City, Yamamoto and other Japanese American artists formed the anti-fascist group Japanese Americans for Democracy.

Topaz War Relocation Center United States historic place

The Topaz War Relocation Center, also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center (Topaz) and briefly as the Abraham Relocation Center, was an American concentration camp camp which housed Americans of Japanese descent and immigrants who had come to the United States from Japan, called Nikkei. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, ordering people of Japanese ancestry to be incarcerated in what were euphemistically called, "relocation centers" like Topaz during World War II. Most of the people incarcerated at Topaz came from the Tanforan Assembly Center and previously lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. The camp was opened in September 1942 and closed in October 1945.

Miné Okubo American artist and writer

Miné Okubo was an American artist and writer. She is best known for her book Citizen 13660, a collection of 189 drawings and accompanying text chronicling her experiences in Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

West Village neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City

The West Village is a neighborhood in the western section of the larger Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, New York City.

In 1946, Yamamoto returned to Berkeley, where he met Jane Emily Pitkin, daughter of nationally recognized educator Royce S. Pitkin who brought Goddard College to prominence as an innovative school in alternative education. Because of California's anti-miscegenation laws, Yamamoto and Pitkin were married in New York City. They then traveled extensively, living at times in different countries, and Yamamoto continually practiced his art. From 1960 to 1971 they lived in Marshfield, Vermont where they raised three children. While in Marshfield, Thomas taught art at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.

Royce S. Pitkin American educator

Royce Stanley “Tim” Pitkin was an American educator. He was President of Goddard College from 1938–1969.

Goddard College American liberal arts college

Goddard College is a private low-residency college with three locations in the United States: Plainfield, Vermont; Port Townsend, Washington; and Seattle, Washington. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs. With predecessor institutions dating to 1863, Goddard College was founded in 1938 as an experimental and non-traditional educational institution based on the ideas of John Dewey: that experience and education are intricately linked.

Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different races. Anti-miscegenation laws were first introduced in North America from the late seventeenth century onwards by several of the Thirteen Colonies, and subsequently by many US states and US territories and remained in force in many US states until 1967.

After Vermont, they lived in Alicante, Spain, Tutuila, American Samoa, and then 24 years in Honolulu, Hawaii before returning to central Vermont shortly before Yamamoto's death in 2004.

Tutuila largest island in American Samoa

Tutuila is the largest and the main island of American Samoa in the archipelago of Samoan Islands. It is the third largest island in the Samoan Islands chain of the Central Pacific located roughly 4,000 kilometers (2,500 mi) north-east of Brisbane, Australia and over 1,200 kilometers (750 mi) northeast of Fiji. It contains a large, natural harbor, Pago Pago Harbor, where Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa is situated. Pago Pago International Airport is also located on Tutuila island. Its land expanse is about 68% of the total land area of American Samoa and with 56,000 people accounts for 95% of its population. The island has six terrestrial and three marine ecosystems.

Vermont U.S. state in the United States

Vermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It borders the U.S. states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the north. Vermont is the second-smallest by population and the sixth-smallest by area of the 50 U.S. states. The state capital is Montpelier, the least populous state capital in the United States. The most populous city, Burlington, is the least populous city to be the most populous city in a state. As of 2019, Vermont was the leading producer of maple syrup in the United States. In crime statistics, it was ranked since 2016 as the safest state in the country.

In 1976, in honor of the American Bicentennial, the town of Marshfield commissioned Yamamoto to do a series of paintings of historical Marshfield. These paintings are still (in 2010) on view in the Jaquith Public Library in the Old Schoolhouse Commons in Marshfield, Vermont.

Related Research Articles

Richard Diebenkorn American painter

Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.

Elmer Bischoff American painter

Elmer Nelson Bischoff was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.

Thomas Hovenden American painter

Thomas Hovenden, was an Irish artist and teacher. He painted realistic quiet family scenes, narrative subjects and often depicted African Americans.

Xavier Martínez American artist

Xavier Martínez was a California artist active in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a well-known bohemian figure in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Monterey Peninsula and one of the co-founders of two California artists' organizations and an art gallery. He painted in a tonalist style and also produced monotypes, etchings, and silverpoint.

Joseph Raffael American artist

Joseph Raffael is an American contemporary realist painter. His paintings, primarily watercolors, are almost all presented on a very large scale.

Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.

Robert Bechtle is an American painter who has lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art is centered on scenes from everyday local life.

James Gahagan was an American abstract expressionist painter and one of the premier American colorists. He was an Associate Director of the Hans Hofmann School and created, with Hoffman, two major mosaic murals in New York City.

John E. Buck American artist

John Buck is an American sculptor and printmaker who was born in Ames, Iowa.

Stephen De Staebler American artist

Stephen De Staebler was an internationally celebrated American sculptor, best recognized for his work in clay and bronze. Totemic and fragmented in form, De Staebler's figurative sculptures call forth the many contingencies of the human condition, such as resiliency and fragility, growth and decay, earthly boundedness and the possibility for spiritual transcendence. An important figure in the California Clay Movement, he is credited with "sustaining the figurative tradition in post-World War II decades when the relevance and even possibility of embracing the human figure seemed problematic at best."

Robert Miles Fisher was an American abstract artist in oils, watercolor, charcoal, and welded sculpture.

Richard Marquis American artist

Richard "Dick" Marquis is an American studio glass artist. One of the first Americans ever to work in a Venetian glass factory, he became a master of Venetian cane and murrine techniques. He is considered a pioneer of American contemporary glass art, and is noted for his quirky, playful work that incorporates flawless technique and underlying seriousness about form and color.

Henry Alexander was an American painter from California.

Chiura Obata Japanese-American artist

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 over a year in internment camps. After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.

William Keith (artist) Scottish-American painter

William Keith was a Scottish-American painter famous for his California landscapes. He is associated with Tonalism and the American Barbizon school. Although most of his career was spent in California, he started out in New York, made two extended study trips to Europe, and had a studio in Boston in 1871-72 and one in New York in 1880.

Walter Kuhlman (1918–2009) was a 20th-century American painter and printmaker. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he was a core member of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. He later worked in a representational style related to American Figurative Expressionism.

Alek Rapoport Russian artist

Alek Rapoport was a Russian Nonconformist artist, art theorist and teacher.

John Zurier is an abstract painter born in Santa Monica, CA, known for his minimal, near-monochrome paintings. His work has shown across the American West as well as in Europe and Japan. He has worked in Reykjavik, Iceland and Berkeley, Ca.

Richard Shaw is an American ceramicist and professor known for his trompe l'oeil style. A term often associated with paintings, referring to the illusion that a two-dimensional surface is three-dimensional. In Shaw's work, it refers to his replication of everyday objects in porcelain. He then glazes these components and groups them in unexpected and even jarring combinations. Interested in how objects can reflect a person or identity, Shaw poses questions regarding the relationship between appearances and reality.

References

  1. ↑ "Thomas Yamamoto - Artist, Fine Art Prices, Auction Records for Thomas Yamamoto". www.askart.com. Retrieved 2018-03-13.
  2. ↑ "Japanese American Internee Data File: Thomas Yamamoto". National Archives and Records Administration . Retrieved 2019-08-17.Cite web requires |website= (help)


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.