Full Description
This book is the most comprehensive publication to date of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani (1920-2012), a Japanese American artist raised in Hiroshima, Japan. From Nihonga ("Japanese-style") paintings to intricate collage works crafted on the streets of New York, Mirikitani's art narrates a life shaped by war, displacement, survival, and collaboration. Drawing from the formal traditions of Japanese painting and the raw immediacy of urban materials, his poignant oeuvre offers a critical narrative of twentieth-century transpacific history and unexpected modes of transnational artistic exchange.
This volume features 163 color illustrations alongside scholarly essays and reflections that frame Mirikitani's practice as both artistic achievement and political intervention. Maki Kaneko's introduction situates the exhibition within the artist's distinctive "street Nihonga" aesthetic—a collaged form of artmaking, storytelling, and community collaboration. Contributors Noriko Murai, Scott Tsuchitani, Yukinori Okamura, and Kris Ercums offer wide-ranging perspectives, including the transnational legacy of Nihonga, the memory politics of Japanese American incarceration, the evolving lineage of "A-bomb art," and the curatorial process behind the exhibition. Linda Hattendorf and Masa Yoshikawa, Mirikitani's close friends and documentarians, provide intimate insights into his life and art.
At once scholarly and inviting, Street Nihonga encourages readers to encounter Mirikitani not as an artist of the margins but as a radical reinterpreter of convention and a witness to histories often left untold. This catalogue remains open-ended—a living collage and a call to engage with Mirikitani's extraordinary life and work.
Contents
Director's foreword - Saralyn Reece Hardy, Marilyn Stokstad Director, Spencer Museum of Art
Acknowledgments
Note to the reader
Introductory essay: Street Nihonga: In Pursuit of Collage Aesthetics and Collaboration - Maki Kaneko
Color plates:
Sidewalk stories
Street nihonga
Tule Lake memory-scape
Multiple ground zeros
Affinities and connections
Entangled memories
Interpretive texts for twelve select works Linda Hattendorf, Masa Yoshikawa, and Maki Kaneko
Essays:
The paradox of nihonga in the art of Mirikitani - Noriko Murai
Tule Lake troubles - Scott Tsuchitani
When "A-bomb art" goes beyond borders - Yukinori Okamura; translated by Daisuke Murata
Curation and collage: Lived experience in the art of Mirikitani - Kris Imants Ercums
Making The Cats of Mirikitani - Linda Hattendorf
List of select exhibitions
Contributors
Index
