East Meets West
Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with a painting by artist Ray Yoshida.Born in Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii, Ray Yoshida graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1951 and then moved to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His experience with the Chicago art world was positive enough to bring him back to the city after he earned an MFA at Syracuse University. He eventually became involved with the new art movements arising in the city, notably the Chicago Imagists.
Yoshida's early work employed cartoon-book cutouts of superheroes, as well as fragments of objects from pictures and advertising, that were arranged to suggest a story line. His art later evolved into geometrical forms covered with intricate dot patterns positioned against an equally intricate background, resulting in ambiguous, ingenious spatial effects.
In Partial Evidences II, he uses layered, twisting, striated forms. These stylized, organic forms have been linked to animist spirits of mountains and places Yoshida recalled from stories he heard as a child in his native Hawaii.
Source: Jacquelyn D. Serwer and Gwen Everett. Chicago Artists: Selections from the Koffler Collection (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1995).
Pictured: Ray Yoshida, born 1930, Partial Evidences II, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 49 3/4 x 45 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the S.W. and B.M. Koffler Foundation.
Celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month with a painting by artist Ray Yoshida.Born in Kapaa, Kauai, Hawaii, Ray Yoshida graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1951 and then moved to Chicago to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His experience with the Chicago art world was positive enough to bring him back to the city after he earned an MFA at Syracuse University. He eventually became involved with the new art movements arising in the city, notably the Chicago Imagists.