Alberta

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 […]

Tim Tamashiro

Tim Tamashiro is a singer and ‘jazz evangelist’, well-known as the host of Tonic on CBC Radio 2. Growing up in Blackfalds, Alberta, Tamashiro had six months of piano lessons before his mother and piano teacher decided to let him teach himself how to play by ear; he has since become a passionate believer in […]

Ohama

Tona Walt Ohama is a composer and performer of electronic synth music who records music in an isolated underground studio on his family’s potato farm in rural Alberta. He has played synthesizers since 1975, when he bought his first monophonic synthesizer, the A.R.P. Axxe, at the age of fifteen. He has been called ‘Alberta’s Best […]

Setsuko Onishi Moulton

Setsuko Onishi Moulton is a Calgary-based printmaker. Born in Japan, she studied French literature in Kobe before immigrating to Canada in 1983. She studied printmaking at the Alberta College of Art and Design, and her work has appeared in a number of solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Japan, and Hong Kong. Her work can […]

Kim Nagata

Kim Nagata is a Calgary-based metalsmith who practiced in the 1990s. Her specialties were silver, gold, and niobium. She studied Jewellery Arts at George Brown College and the Alberta College of Arts, and apprenticed at Calgary-based jewellers. She received a SEAD Grant from the National Association of Japanese Canadians, and was a member of the […]

Noboru Kubo

Noboru Kubo was a Japanese-born and educated fourth generation master potter. In Japan he studied his craft alongside his father, and at the Kyoto Industrial Arts School, where he received a degree in 1964. He first came to North America in 1969, and exhibited in multiple solo, group, invitational, and juried shows in Canada and […]

Joe Naito

Joe Naito was an architect who practiced for over forty years in Edmonton. He was born and raised in Kelowna, BC, and studied architecture at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1957. He practiced privately through the firm Sinclair & Naito Architects Limited in Edmonton, and worked on projects throughout Alberta including the University […]

Tom Morimoto

Tom Morimoto is the author of the memoir, Breaking Trail: From Canada’s Northern Frontier to the Oil Fields of Dubai. He was born in Edmonton and grew up in Fort McMurray, one of seven brothers. As a young man, he worked in his father’s garden and on a scow on the Athabasca River with the […]

Junichi Hashimoto

Junichi Hashimoto is a retired architect and active watercolor painter. He graduated from the school of architecture in Kyoto in 1962 and came to Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1966 through the Japan Architects Association’s Young Architect Exchange Program with Canadian architects. He worked as project architect for GBR Associates on various projects such as the hospital […]

Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull

Marjene Matsunaga Turnbull is a ceramicist and doll-maker. She produced functional pottery from 1987 – 2012. She also created Nikkei kokeshi (Japanese wooden dolls) – each one unique in facial expression and design. From 1981, Turnbull compiled family stories and in 1991 finished writing and editing the book Hisaoka Family Memoirs. Turnbull needed to know […]

Kerry Nagata

Kerry Nagata is a Calgary-based architect. He holds a BA in Urban Geography from the University of Alberta and a Master of Environmental Design in Architecture from the University of Calgary. Early in his career, Nagata worked on corporate buildings in Canada and Russia, and later joined the Calgary firm Marshall Tittemore in 2001. In […]

Robert Hirano

Robert Hirano is a Lethbridge-based architect who specializes in heritage preservation and conservation of historic and heritage sites with his firm, rkh architecture. They have worked on a variety of projects in public, industrial, commercial, and institutional settings, including the Raymond Community Centre, Lethbridge Fire Hall No. 1, Lethbridge Main Street (Lethbridge’s historic downtown), University […]

Yoko Oike-Wong

Yoko Oike-Wong is a violinist and teacher of violin. She came to Edmonton from Matsumoto, Japan in 1965 by invitation from the Society for Talent Education for the express purpose of introducing the Suzuki Method, a way of violin training for young children initiated by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki who was Oike-Wong’s teacher and mentor from […]

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 […]