RICHMOND — A presentation on “The Life and Art of Chiura Obata” will be given on Saturday, Feb. 22, at 3 p.m. at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park’s Visitor Education Center, 1414 Harbour Way South, Suite 3000, Richmond.
Chiura Obata (1885-1975) trained in Japan in the traditional form of sumi-e (ink painting) and became a professor of art at UC Berkeley. Today his paintings are in the collections of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, and the Smithsonian Institution. His art and letters from a 1927 trip to the High Sierra in 1927 have been published in a book, “Obata’s Yosemite.”
Kimi Kodani Hill is the granddaughter of Obata and the author of “Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata’s Art of the Internment.” Her slideshow and talk will focus on Obata’s body of artwork from the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, where he and his family were forcibly incarcerated during World War II, along with thousands of other Americans of Japanese descent.
The event will be held not long after the 72nd anniversary (Feb. 19) of the executive order that authorized the mass internment.
For more information, call (510) 232-5050, ext. 0 or visit www.nps.gov/rori/planyourvisit/directions.htm.