Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist

This book is the culminating study in a series of related works by art historian Barbara Johns, PhD. These include The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness, and Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diary of Kamekichi Tokita (both UW Press, 2017 and 2011). Kenjiro Nomura (1896-1956) was born in Japan and came to the United States with his parents at the age of ten. On his own by sixteen, painting became a constant throughout his life as he experienced not only major artistic recognition but also business success and failure, racism and wartime incarceration, and, at last, American citizenship. The peak of his artistic success was the 1930s, when his paintings represented the Northwest in New York, Washington, DC, and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Incarcerated during World War II along with 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast, he continued to paint, leaving a record of his experience in more than one hundred