Jimmy Mirikitani

Tsutomu "Jimmy" Mirikitani (June 15, 1920 – October 21, 2012) was an American artist notable as the subject of the 2006 documentary film The Cats of Mirikitani.

Biography Mirikitani was born June 15, 1920, in Sacramento, California. By age 4, his family had moved to Hiroshima, Japan. He returned to the US shortly before the US entered World War II, and as a result he was sent to the Tule Lake internment camp. In the decades after the war, he worked a series of odd jobs until the early 1950s, when he wound up unemployed and homeless in New York City. Here he began producing brightly colored drawings with ballpoint pen or colored pencil and selling them in parks. When an art professor found him sleeping in the Columbia University library, he referred Mirikitani to the New York Buddhist Church, who provided him with housing.

From February 19, 2026–June 28, 2026, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence exhibited Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani. The exhibit featured approximately 160 works in different mediums that “became both a survival strategy and a means of transforming memories of his transpacific journey and Japanese American experiences into shared testimony.”