Visual Arts

Baco Ohama

Baco Ohama describes herself as a sensorialist, a writer, a text walker, a maker, and as an artist who works with the felt and the found. She says she is drawn to slow conversations and everyday poetics, and often finds herself thinking about the relationships between history, language, and location. A sansei who grew up […]

Ron Kanashiro

Ron Kanashiro was a sculptor of mixed-media pieces in the 1980s and 1990s. Born in Alberta, he exhibited largely in Calgary and Lethbridge, but also had pieces shown in Edmonton and Toronto. Although he retired his art practice and now works in the oil industry, his work has been added to several important art collections, […]

Mitsuru Cope

Mitsuru Cope is a Japanese-born ceramicist and painter who trained at Champlain College and Concordia University in Montreal. She has taken part in exhibitions in Quebec, Alberta, and the Czech Republic. Cope was one of six JC participants (with Baco Ohama, Stan Taniwa, Takako Suzuki, Sadashi Inuzuka and Bryce Kanbara) in the momentous ‘Community’ project […]

Ruth Yamada

Ruth Yamada was a sumi-e artist and watercolour painter, and founder of the Toronto-based group Sumi-e Artists of Canada. Professionally, Yamada worked as the lead fashion artist for Fairweather Clothing. Her sumi-e and watercolours were exhibited at a number of solo exhibitions in Ontario, and part of group exhibitions internationally, including in Japan. Yamada was […]

Haruko Okano

Haruko Okano is a process-based, collaborative, multidisciplinary, mixed media artist whose practice aims to break away from traditional, Eurocentric genres to integrate elements of her Japanese ancestry as well as holistic traditions of hunter-gatherer cultures. Okano also guides her practice with her concerns for the natural environment and the planet’s preservation, often using recycled materials […]

Linda Ohama

Linda Ohama is a filmmaker (producer and director) with an extensive history of integrating community, historical, and social justice initiatives in and around her films. She is also well known for her print, Watari Dori (A Bird of Passage), which was produced and sold in the 1980s to raise funds and awareness for the Redress […]

Aiko Suzuki

Aiko Suzuki was a prolific and versatile artist whose work took the forms of textiles, acrylic and oil painting, or just painting, printmaking, installations, and even multimedia works and set design. She was also an art educator, curator, and a leader and mentor in the arts community: not the least of her achievements was the […]

Densaku (Fred) Kondo

Densaku (Fred) Kondo was a painter, known for his piece ‘Evacuation’ which is in the collection of the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Toronto. He was born in the Shiga prefecture of Japan in 1899. He married Tsune Ebata in 1929, and the couple had one daughter, Hiroko (Betty). He exhibited in Vancouver as early […]

Ken Fukushima

Ken Fukushima is a Toronto-based architect who has designed such projects as the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Jane-Sheppard branch of the Toronto Public Library, Seneca College Markham Campus building, and a pavilion for the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. After receiving his B.Arch at Carleton University and his M. Arch. from Cranbook Academy of […]

Joyce Kamikura

Joyce Kamikura is a painter and print-maker. She was one of the first Canadians to be bestowed Signature Member of the National Watercolor Society (NWS – USA). She was also one of the first women to be given the top ranking title in the Federation of Canadian Artists as a Senior Signature Member (SFCA). Exhibitions […]

Gabe Anderson

Takashi Gabe Anderson is a visual artist, born 1970 in Toronto. He is a 4th generation Japanese- Canadian artist. His mother is Ayako Ellen Anderson nee Yamasaki. She was a set designer in the theatre, an actress, and a social activist as well as the founder of CSAC Creative Spirit Art Centre. Gabe’s biological father […]

Lillian Michiko Yano

I am a sansei, a third-generation Japanese Canadian artist. Currently, my art explores multifaceted Japanese Canadian experiences of intergenerational healing. By exploring my family’s relationship with Canada through my art, I have finally found my identity as a Canadian who is Japanese. As one of eight Japanese Canadian artists telling the Japanese Canadian story of […]

Ellen Anderson

Ayako Ellen Yamasaki Anderson is an artist, writer, and social activist. She was born in 1943, in Sandon, BC. Sandon was an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during the war. Ellen is considered a sansei third generation Japanese-Canadian but her great grandmother was actually a first generation Issei from Japan. Ellen trained as a visual […]

Yuriko Igarashi Kitamura

Yuriko Igarashi Kitamura is a watercolour painter. Kitamura graduated from university in Japan, and worked in pharmacology there before she and her family moved to the U.S., finally settling in Canada. After 20 years as a homemaker she began taking art courses at the U of A Faculty of Extension, under Mr. Harry Savage. His […]

San Murata

ARTIST San Murata is an Ontario-based painter living in a historic small town near Toronto. Born in Japan, he graduated from the University of Musashi in Tokyo with a degree in Economics in 1964. In 1968, he travelled to Canada to ‘have a look around’, and liked it so much that he decided to stay. […]