For art curator David Martin, a chance encounter in 1986
ignited his interest in a long forgotten Japanese American artist
when he unrolled it the painting was really in bad condition
it had holes in it, it had a big slash in it.
I asked him who the artist was, and he said it was his father.
I said, Is your father a famous artist?
And he said, Well, he was, but he's been forgotten.
The man's father was Kenjiro Nomura,
who was active in Seattle's art scene from 1910 through the 1950s.
When I saw the breadth of his work, work that he had done from the teens,
into the twenties, into the thirties, I was just overwhelmed.
David Martin is now curator of the Cascadia Art Museum.
36 years after restoring that first Nomura painting,
Martin has pulled together an exhibition showcasing Nomura's forgotten work.
His work has a wonderful freshness and vitality.
It retains its currency.
It's a real gift to us.
Barbara Johns is an art historian and author of the book
Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist.
It tells the story of Nomura's emigration to the United States in 1907.
His early years in Tacoma and eventual move to Seattle, where he settled
in the vibrant Japanese-American enclave known as Nihonmachi.
Nomura and his colleague Kamekichi Tokita were sign painters.
They had a shop on 6th Avenue between Main and Washington.
A number of the paintings in this exhibition
are in the immediate vicinity of that sign shop
Puget Sound, for instance.
It's a view from the vacant lot immediately adjacent
that red brick building in the foreground still stands.
There's an intimacy about them.
They picture the pathways and the alleys.
The interest is more in the local view, the way one might walk through
that street.
Nomura was recognized during the thirties for the clarity of light
that he could imbue in his views.
A good gauging of how well
Mr. Nomura was thought of in the community is that
he was asked to be the first artist to have a solo exhibition
at the Seattle Art Museum when it first opened in 1933.
So he was well on his way to attaining
a very impressive national reputation until the war broke out.
World War II was devastating
to Seattle's Japanese American community.
Executive order 9066 was a turning point.
It authorized the forced removal of all people
of Japanese descent from the West Coast.
There is little written record of Nomura's reaction to these events,
but in researching her book, Barbara Johns
uncovered a story recounted by a neighboring business owner
that provides a glimpse of Nomura state of mind.
She described Nomura as being deeply upset, going out
behind the shop, lighting the burn barrel and beginning to burn his paintings.
It was one of those
graphic details that suddenly gives the author
or the reader, I hope, insight into the anguish of that time.
Nomura, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans, was first taken
to the Puyallup Relocation Center, where, remarkably, he continued to paint.
There's a series of nine watercolors and these are a really interesting shift
from his work in the 1930s.
If there were any figures in the paintings, the 1930s,
they're very secondary.
But suddenly with these drawings and paintings from Puyallup
they are filled with figures.
It's almost as if a shift in the crisis he felt a need
to document these historic times.
From Puyallup, Nomura, his wife and son were sent to the Minidoka
incarceration camp in the high desert of southern Idaho.
Here, his work
returns to a more timeless view, focusing on the landscapes.
And improbably, he succeeds in capturing the beauty
of the varied terrain where he is held prisoner.
The years following
the war were not a celebratory return to a pre-war life.
Just a year after returning to Seattle, Nomura's
wife battling depression took her own life.
Nomura wouldn't paint again until 1947,
when some younger colleagues encouraged him to pick up his sketchbook.
Quickly however, his work took a new turn
towards abstraction,
a new style
reflecting the new world he came home to after the war.
And in this work, the night of 1947
seems to culminate with this painting of Puget Sound,
and we see the buildings blocked into
becoming abstract shapes and then this wonderful
giant kelp that encircles and circles the composition.
Nomura was very much an artist of his time
after World War two abstraction
was very much in the air.
Through the early 1950s, Nomura did regain
some level of success, with his new abstract style
being selected for regional and international exhibitions.
But he never regained the prominence that he enjoyed before the war,
although he was starting to rebuild his reputation.
He had gotten sick and died
at the age of 59.
In coming decades he's been largely forgotten, and we intend that really mark his place
and not only regional history,
but also American history and American art history.
I think the story of Kenjiro Nomura
is a story of triumph and tenacity.
Nomura's work offers insight into the life of a first generation American.
One whose eye for everyday scenes and urban details
make his work both impressive examples of 20th century
art and powerful documentation of the region's history.
David Martin
believes it's a legacy worth remembering.
That's what we're all about here is reinstating reputations of artists
who really deserve it and Kenjiro Nomura really deserves it.