Frank Okada

Frank Sumio Okada (1931–2000) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, mainly active in the Pacific Northwest. His mature style often featured brightly colored, off-kilter geometric shapes done in large format, including round canvasses; subtly elaborate brushwork suggested the influence of both traditional Asian art and the "mystics" of the Northwest School. His later work at times used symbolic shapes which more directly evoked his Nisei heritage and the years he spent in detention camps with his family during World War II.

He taught art at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon from 1969 to 1999.

Early life Frank Sumio Okada was born in Seattle, Washington in 1931. His parents, immigrants from the Hiroshima area in Japan, managed residence hotels in the International District near downtown Seattle. He was the youngest of four brothers, and had two younger sisters. In 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and signing of Executive Order 9066, Okada and his family spent two years in detention at Camp Harmony and the Minidoka Relocation Center, and another year in Ione, Washington (outside the Japanese exclusion zone), where his father worked in a laundry. His brothers Charlie and John served in the United States Army. Charlie Okada was in the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, along with an older foster brother who was killed in action in Italy. While at Cranbrook he began visiting New York City, where he met many of the leading lights of Abstract Expressionism, whose inspiration began to show in his own work. After winning a Whitney Fellowship in 1957 he spent about a year in New York, studying and exhibiting. Evenings were often spent at the Cedar Tavern, interacting with the members of the city's burgeoning modern art scene. Okada's work received considerable attention. He was associated with the Brata Gallery, where he showed regularly, and was profiled in a 'new talent' issue of Art in America magazine. However, he found it difficult to develop his style amid the excitement of New York, and was disappointed by how quickly commercial interests and new hierarchies took root as the city became the world's new focus of modern art. In 1958 he returned to Seattle. He shared a studio space with friend and fellow painter William Ivey in the rough-hewn Pioneer Square section of downtown Seattle. In 1968 the two briefly opened the Seattle Studio School, giving private lessons to a handful of students. He continued his friendship with painter/collagist Paul Horiuchi, whom he had first met in the mid-1950s when Horiuchi was still working as an auto body repairman ("The first part of Paul I saw were his feet, as he was working under a car," Okada later recalled),

Said painter Fred Mitchell, who had instructed Okada at Cranbrook Academy: "[He] was the most consistently expressive painter, bringing together great power for shaping and giving life to color forms. To look at his paintings was to fall into the grip of his formative intensity, and to feel the full force of his form-creating energy."