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Kristine Kim with an introduction by Karin Higa, Senior Curator of Art, Japanese American National Museum
Foreword by Lawrence M. Small, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, Epilogue by Madeleine Sugimoto, Translations by Emily Anderson

160 pages (9 x 9), with 20 b&w photos, 60 color plates
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-43-0, $24.95

Published in conjunction with the Japanese American National Museum

It is a long way from the town of Wakayama in central Japan to West 146th Street in New York City's Harlem, but painter Henry Sugimoto traversed this wide divide in more than just the physical sense. He began life as the grandson of a displaced samurai and died in 1990 an American painter. From his early years in California, Paris, and Mexico to the transformative impact of the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans, Sugimoto's art became a vivid expression of the American immigrant experience.

Henry Sugimoto is the first-ever survey of this relatively unknown but remarkable artist. From the early work influenced by the European impressionists and post-impressionists to the later work that extensively documents and interprets the experiences of Japanese Americans behind barbed wire, this is a stunning body of work. Henry Sugimoto accompanies a major exhibition of his work at the Japanese American National Museum in Spring 2001.

Reviews

"This book puts Sugimoto’s art in context with his life and times and beautifully reprints much of his work."—Utah Historical Quarterly

"Sugimoto had been a rising artist, trained in France and known as a painter of the placid fields and lush landscapes of rural California...His internment at two camps in Arkansas left him melancholy...but also gave his work depth and poignancy."—New York Times

"Drawing on his camp experiences, Sugimoto created a body of work that is poignant, even heartbreaking, sometimes angry, always resonant—but the artwork that focuses on the ordeal of the internment offers a vision that is uniquely his own"—LA Times

Author Biography:

Kristine Kim is associate curator at the Japanese American National Museum, where she previously organized the exhibition A Process of Reflection: Paintings by Hisako Hibi. She received a B.A. from Mills College in 1994 and is currently completing graduate work in the department of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on twentieth-century art and Asian American artists.