Matsumi Kanemitsu

Matsumi "Mike" Kanemitsu (May 28, 1922 – May 11, 1992) was a Japanese-American painter who was also proficient in Japanese style sumi and lithography.

Early life Kanemitsu was born to Japanese parents in Ogden, Utah on May 28, 1922. At age three, he was taken to Japan and grew up in a suburb of Hiroshima with his grandparents. He returned to the United States in 1940 and enlisted in the United States Army in 1941 at Fort Douglas, at which point he renounced his Japanese citizenship and became solely an American citizen. He was arrested after the attack on Pearl Harbor and interrogated then released. In the following years he was detained in army camps in the Midwest (including Fort Douglas, Utah, and Fort Riley). Among the jobs he took to support himself while in art school was a position as director of entertainment in a Baltimore gambling hall, where he oversaw the striptease dancers. Later in the 1950s, with the support of Frank O'Hara and Harold Rosenberg, he was able to show his work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Radich Gallery. in part due to his dislike of the rise of Pop Art in New York, Kanemitsu died of lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles on May 11, 1992.

Kanemitsu's work is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts.

Selected Public Collections

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, California Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan Grunewald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, California Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum, Hiroshima, Japan Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Wales New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico Norah Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, University of Utah, Logan, Utah Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California Oklahoma City Art Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California