Roger Shimomura

Roger Shimomura (born Roger Yutaka Shimomura in 1939 in Seattle) is an American artist and a retired professor at the University of Kansas, having taught there from 1969 to 2004. His art, showcased across the United States, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Israel, often combines American popular culture, traditional Asian tropes, and stereotypical racial imagery to provoke thought and debate on issues of identity and social perception.

Early life Roger Shimomura was born on June 26, 1939, at the Shimomura family home in Seattle, Washington's Central District. He was delivered by his grandmother, Toku, a professional midwife who would become an important figure in his life and art. His father, Eddy Kazuo Shimomura, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Aya, was a homemaker. Both parents were U.S.-born nisei whose parents had emigrated from Japan in the early 1900s.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, signing of Executive Order 9066, and the beginning of Japanese incarceration, his family was forcibly relocated on short notice and incarcerated at Camp Harmony in Puyallup, Washington. They were transported from there to the more permanent Minidoka camp in Idaho. After about two years at Minidoka, the family moved to Chicago (outside the West Coast Japanese exclusion zone), where Shimomura's father had secured a job in a pharmacy. The family lived there for a few months before returning to Seattle at war's end in 1945. Shimomura's younger sister Carolyn had died of meningitis during their stay in Chicago.

Education After graduating from Garfield High School, Shimomura began studying graphic design at the University of Washington, earning his BA in 1961. He was required to join the ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) program. Despite his severe distaste for the program, he did very well in his military studies. From 1962 to 64 he served as an artillery officer in the 1st Cavalry Division, stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, and in Korea.

After leaving the Army, Shimomura began working as a commercial artist and designer, including work on the Polynesian Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1964. He became frustrated with the limitations of the field. He began taking painting classes at the University of Washington, where, under the influence of the emerging Pop Art movement, he discovered the possibilities in combining fine art with his lifelong interest in pop culture. Transferring to Syracuse University in New York, where he experimented with filmmaking and performance art, Shimomura received his MFA degree in 1969. That same year, he took a job teaching art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. He taught there for the next 35 years, until his retirement in 2004. He has also expressed admiration for the Pop Art movement, citing Andy Warhol as "my biggest influence, visually, historically, and stylistically". His more subtle works often combine traditional Japanese woodblock printing with impressions of the incarceration camps, taken from both his own youthful memories and passages from the diary that his grandmother Toku kept for many years. Since his retirement from teaching in 2004, he has continued painting, giving lectures, and exhibiting.

Collections His works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), First Kansas Master Artist Award in the Visual Arts, Kansas Arts Commission, Topeka, Kansas (2008) Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award, New York City (2003) Kansas Governor's Arts Award, Governor Joan Finney, Topeka, Kansas (1994) In 1999, the Seattle Urban League designated a scholarship in his name that has been awarded annually to a Seattle resident pursuing a career in art.