Artist as Social Critic

Artist Bios

ROGER SHIMOMURA

Roger Shimomura’s paintings and prints, as seen in this exhibition, are from his recent series titled Minidoka on My Mind. Award-winning Sansei poet Amy Uyematsu, in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, wrote: “To view Roger Shimomura’s art is an exciting, even dangerous experience-his work is provocative, jarring, and vigorously challenges our notions of history, ethnic images, popular culture, and American ideals. In Minidoka on My Mind, he takes us head on into the racial conflicts of World War II and the unjust imprisonment of approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans (over 60 percent being American citizens).”

In addition to the haunting memory-landscapes of the camp-there were some darkly ironic and powerfully evocative images such as Bad Dream and Shadow of the Enemy that subtly and ironically comment on man’s inhumanity to man.

ENRIQUE CHAGOYA

Born in Mexico City in 1953, Enrique Chagoya makes paintings, drawings, and prints that focus on social, cultural, and political problems that have plagued humankind since time immemorial.

Whether re-interpreting Goya’s Disasters of War or appropriating images from American mass media, Mexican folk art, religious icons, and Disney cartoons, Chagoya chooses to add humor as he creates his own personal aesthetic as a satirist in the tradition of Daumier and Hogarth.

Chagoya questions and criticizes assumptions about history and the ways in which it was written and interpreted, as contrasted with ways in which twentieth century artists have incorporated non-Western cultural icons into their own work. Chagoya reverses the process by taking images from the dominant American culture and using them for his own purposes.

BETYE SAAR

Betye Saar’s distinguished work spans more than four decades in time and uses a variety of media on a broad spectrum of subjects, including social and political commentary. Her trenchant series The Liberation of Aunt Jemima started in the early 1970s and has resumed recently. Using the stereotypical image of Aunt Jemima (familiar from pancake mix boxes), she transforms her into a militant, rifle-toting, empowered warrior woman.

In many of her paintings, drawings, assemblages, and installations, Betye Saar deals with civil rights, racial discrimination, and the fight against injustice in general. In less political work, she has explored mysticism of all kinds, mythology, superstition, voodoo, and other belief systems. The artist also reveals tender feelings for family ties, as well as the powers of memory and nostalgia for times past.

BEN SAKOGUCHI

Ben Sakoguchi’s small canvases carry important messages on a global scale. The artist began the series in 1974 and continues to work on them to this day. Stylistically, they are painted in the language of “realism” and address a wide variety of issues focusing on social, cultural, racial, and political matters.

Using seemingly benign imagery, they deal in a perceptive, trenchant, and often humorous way with weighty and frequently tragic problems in the deceptively cheerful format of orange crate labels, known for their advertising-like depictions of pastoral California with its sunshine-ripened oranges.

This exhibition featured four groupings of the Orange Crate Label series, including The Caprices, The Disasters of War, Postcards from Camp, and The Unauthorized History of Baseball.

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