This beautiful and poignant biography of Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and the more optimistic times that preceded it. Tokita emigrated from Japan in the early twentieth century and settled in Seattle's Japanese American immigrant community. By the 1930s, he was established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene and allied with the region's progressive artists. His art shares qualities of American Realism while it embodies a ditinctively Issei perspective on his new home.\nOn the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Tokita started a diary that he vowed to keep until the war ended. In it he recorded with great vividness and insight the events, fears, rumors, restrictions, and his own emotional turmoil before and during his detention at Minidoka. The diary in this book is a rare personal account of this time written as events were unfolding and by a person of maturity and stature.\nThis book contextualizes Tokita's paintings and diary within the art community and Japanese America. It also introduces us to an amazing man who embraced life despite living through challenging and disheartening times.

Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies (Hardcover))

Arts & Photography

Johns, Barbara

History & Criticism

University of Washington Press

This is the first book-length account of the world Anne Gould Hauberg both discovered and helped bring into being. A major figure in Seattle's cultural life, she has been an instigator of ideas for innumerable people and organizations, sometimes when no one else could see the way, and has provided critical support that helped launch many artists' careers. Author Barbara Johns brings her own intimate knowledge of Seattle's art and architectural heritage to the story of Anne Hauberg's life and accomplishments. Johns has an acute ear for an anecdote and a sensibility for context as Hauberg wove her passion for beauty into the cultural fabric of a great city.
Anne's story begins in 1917 on Bainbridge Island. Her mother, Dorothy Fay Gould, was one of the first women to teach at the University of Washington, and her father, Carl F. Gould, was the architect of many of Seattle's landmark buildings and much of the university campus. Anne took a class from Mark Tobey at the Cornish School and in 1935 enrolled in the University of Washington School of Architecture, in a program that produced such architectural leaders as Victor Steinbreuck, Paul Hayden Kirk, and Roland Terry.
In 1941 she married John H. Hauberg, Jr., grandson of the co-founder of the Weyerhaeuser Company. When two of their children were born with mental disabilities, Anne refused to accept the standard practice of institutionalization and held out hope for the development of alternative care. Her unyielding conviction spawned the Pilot School for Neurologically Impaired Children, today the highly regarded Experimental Education Unit at the University of Washington.
Anne Gould Hauberg is legendary for her advocacy of artists, the creative spirit, and the handmade object. Her openness to creative possibility contributed most famously to the beginnings of the Pilchuck Glass School. Hers has been a life of commitment, filled with passion for beauty and for universal access to art. As Priscilla Beard writes, "The Northwest would be a far less colorful place were it not for the unique personal vision, style, and indefatigable energy of this thoroughly modern Medici."
Barbara Johns, former chief curator at the Tacoma Art Museum and executive director of the Pilchuck Glass School, is an art historian and independent curator.

Anne Gould Hauberg: Fired by Beauty

Born in Japan in 1906, Paul Horiuchi came to America as a youth of fourteen and found work with the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming. He held the job for two decades, until World War II brought racist reaction, dislocation, and hardship to people of Japanese descent. And all the while he painted. Working the railroad by day, Horiuchi painted in any spare moments and eventually exhibited in Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland. When the war ended, he and his family settled in Seattle to make a new and permanent home. Here his art career began to take root―and with his discovery of collage, it burst into full bloom. Nature was his source of inspiration; collage was his métier. Acting on his friend Mark Tobey's recommendation that he use his Japanese heritage in his art, Horiuchi expressed the beauty of the natural landscape in abstract form. With painted and torn papers laid down on canvas or board, he produced art that ranged from monumental to intimate, from fluid motion to rich repose. Horiuchi gained national and international recognition for his work, as well as an admiring and devoted following in the Northwest. Paul Horiuchi died in 1999. This book provides a narrative of his life and major accomplishments, generously illustrated with historical photographs and works of art.

Paul Horiuchi: East and West

This beautiful and poignant biography of Issei artist Kamekichi Tokita uses his paintings and wartime diary to vividly illustrate the experiences, uncertainties, joys, and anxieties of Japanese Americans during the World War II internment and the more optimistic times that preceded it. Tokita emigrated from Japan in the early twentieth century and settled in Seattle’s Japanese American immigrant community. By the 1930s, he was established as a prominent member of the Northwest art scene and allied with the region's progressive artists. His art shares qualities of American Realism while it embodies a ditinctively Issei perspective on his new home. On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Tokita started a diary that he vowed to keep until the war ended. In it he recorded with great vividness and insight the events, fears, rumors, restrictions, and his own emotional turmoil before and during his detention at Minidoka. The diary in this book is a rare personal account of this time written as events were unfolding and by a person of maturity and stature. This book contextualizes Tokita’s paintings and diary within the art community and Japanese America. It also introduces us to an amazing man who embraced life despite living through challenging and disheartening times.

Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies)

Takuichi Fujii (1891–1964) left Japan in 1906 to make his home in Seattle, where he established a business, started a family, and began his artistic practice. When war broke out between the United States and Japan, he and his family were incarcerated along with the more than 100,000 ethnic Japanese located on the West Coast. Sent to detention camps at Puyallup, Washington, and then Minidoka in Idaho, Fujii documented his daily experiences in words and art. The Hope of Another Spring reveals the rare find of a large and heretofore unknown collection of art produced during World War II. The centerpiece of the collection is Fujii's illustrated diary that historian Roger Daniels has called "the most remarkable document created by a Japanese American prisoner during the wartime incarceration." Barbara Johns presents Takuichi Fujii's life story and his artistic achievements within the social and political context of the time. Sandy Kita, the artist's grandson, provides translations and an introduction to the diary. The Hope of Another Spring is a significant contribution to Asian American studies, American and regional history, and art history.

The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies)

Modern Art from the Pacific Northwest in the Collection of the Seattle Art Museum

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Seattle Art Museum

Review\n"Kenjiro Nomura... restores him to his place in art history and provides an important lssei artist viewpoint of the wartime incarceration in images."―Densho\n"This dynamic book furthers Johns's important contributions to scholarship on American art history."―Stephen H. Sumida, professor emeritus, University of Washington\n"Johns has brought Kenjiro Nomura out of the shadows, powerfully demonstrating his development as an American artist and his central engagement with midcentury modernism."―Greg Robinson, author of The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans\nBorn in Japan, acclaimed Seattle artist Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956) came to the United States as a child of ten, received artistic recognition by age twenty, and in the 1930s became the best-known artist of Japanese descent in the Northwest, his artwork widely exhibited regionally and nationally. Along with more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans from the West Coast, Nomura was incarcerated during the war but continued to paint, leaving a visual record grounded in place and circumstance. In postwar years he developed a new abstract style that brought him recognition once again.\nIn Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist, Barbara Johns presents Nomura's life and artistic achievement within their historical context. Her account depicts Seattle as a stronghold of prewar Issei artistic activity, and Nomura's work as providing a meaningful contribution to the history of American art. The book is generously illustrated with artwork tracing Nomura's entire career. David F. Martin, curator of the Cascadia Art Museum, expands the context of Nomura's accomplishment with an account of the artists with whom Nomura associated.\nThis publication is distributed for the Cascadia Art Museum.\nBook Description\nThe first in-depth exploration of a prominent Seattle-based Issei artist

Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist's Journey

Cascadia Art Museum

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Books by Johns, Barbara