Visual Arts

Arthur Nishimura

Arthur Nishimura is a photographer. He was born in the small, rural town of Raymond in Southern Alberta. His parents were immigrants to the area in the late 1910s. Photography was adopted by his father in the 1920s as a means to communicate his life in Canada to friends and family in Japan. This practice […]

Eugene Ouchi

Eugene Ouchi was a printmaker and graphic designer. Born in Vernon, British Columbia, he studied at the Alberta College of Art – later, he became a teacher there. He had a career in the graphic design industry spanning more than thirty years, working on book design as well as corporate and information design. Ouchi’s prints […]

Barb Miiko Gravlin

Barbara ‘Miiko’ Nishimura- Gravlin was born in Tashme, the largest of Japanese Canadian internment camps in B.C. At an early age, she became an abstract painter under mentors, Richard Gorman and Mashel Teitelbaum and Kazuo Nakamura. In 1965, she was the recipient of a Canada Council Travel grant in Painting for six months tenure studying […]

Sue Sumi Tabuchi

Sue Sumi Tabuchi is a sumi-e artist whose work was featured in the 1978 Japanese Canadian Centennial exhibition. She began to learn sumi-e techniques from her father at the age of two, and later went on to develop a watercolour style based on traditional sumi-e techniques. She usually depicts subjects from nature, such as flowers […]

Shin Sugino

Shin Sugino is a renowned photographer with an extensive body of work in both commercial and art photography. Born in Japan and raised by French nuns, Sugino originally studied to become a priest, but became disillusioned with this life and immigrated to Canada at the age of 19 to become a photographer. Graduating from Ryerson […]

Kazuo Hamasaki

Kazuo Richard Hamasaki was a Nisei painter trained in the Nanga tradition of Japanese painting. His paintings have been exhibited in galleries across Canada and the United States, including Hawaii, as well as in Japan and Brazil. They can also be found in private and corporate collections around the world: in the US and Canada […]

Robert Yamashita

Robert Noboru Yamashita is a retired architect. He worked for the City of Toronto from 1968 to 2000, where he was the lead figure for homelessness, poverty, mental health, and housing issues. He is currently exploring a practice as an abstract painter and photographer.

Miya Turnbull

Miya Turnbull is a Canadian multi-disciplinary visual artist. Primarily a mask maker, she also works in many mediums such as painting, photography, screen printing, textiles, video, animation and projection. She is of settler, mixed Japanese-Canadian ancestry(Yonsei) and grew up on a farm 45km NW of Edmonton, Alberta (Treaty 6 territory). Her mother, Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull, […]

Ruth Ohi

Ruth Ohi is a writer and illustrator of children’s books. She has illustrated over 60 books, 19 of which she is also the author. Her work includes the illustrations for Naomi’s Tree by Joy Kogawa, and more recently a book about the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Kenta and the Big Wave.

Minako Takahashi

Minako Takahashi is a visual and mixed media artist. She was born in Tokyo and moved to Takefu, Fukui-ken at the age of two. While a student at Takefu high school, her art work was chosen for inclusion in such exhibitions as the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper national student art exhibition and the modern art exhibition […]

Stan Taniwa

Stan Taniwa is a muralist and ceramicist based in Manitoba. Born in Chemainus, Taniwa’s family was forcibly removed from the coast when he was a baby and lived in an internment camp, eventually resettling in Thunder Bay. Taniwa studied architectural drafting and later ceramics at the University of Manitoba. He began exhibiting his clay works […]

Tomiyo Sasaki

Tomiyo Sasaki is a pioneer of experimental video art from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Born in British Columbia, she began her art training in Canada, and continued in the United States, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master of Arts in Sculpture from the […]

Sadashi Inuzuka

Sadashi Inuzuka is a visual artist with a background in ceramics who also creates installations and public art projects. Born in Japan, he had a life-long ambition to immigrate to North America and become an artist. He received a diploma from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1985, and went on to […]

Isao Sanami Morrill

Isao Sanami Morrill is a Japanese-born and educated potter and painter based in Nova Scotia. In addition to studying pottery with several Japanese masters, she has also studied Western pottery methods with Don Morrill, her husband, and others. She has travelled the world to study her craft in such places as Mexico, Nigeria, where she […]

Shozo Ushiroguchi

Shozo Ushiroguchi is a photographer who began making black and white photographic prints over 50 years ago when he moved from Japan to Germany; that’s where he apprenticed in a photo studio in West Berlin and attended a technical institute for film and photography. Over the years, his black and white prints have continued to […]