Martin elia nomura biography books

February 5, 2022

Densho Content Director Brian Niiya reviews Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey, a beautifully illustrated exhibition companion book and biography that completes Barbara Johns’ invaluable trilogy on major Issei artists from the Seattle area.

For much of the past two decades, Seattle-based art historian Barbara Johns has chronicled the life and work of Issei artists from the Pacific Northwest, both in the context of the burgeoning art scene there and through their World War II exile in American concentration camps.

This current volume, which accompanies a new exhibition on Nomura at the Cascadia Art Museum is the last of a series of three books Johns has authored on the three major Issei artists from Seattle, the others being Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita (2011) and The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artists and Wartime Witness