Works of artist Chiura Obata

An online conversation with Smithsonian American Art Museum curator of prints and drawings Alex Mann about the work of artist Chiura Obata, who was the subject of a recent SAAM exhibition. Obata was a prominent and influential teacher, painter, and printmaker whose synthesis of different art traditions defied the usual division between “East” and “West.” The SAAM exhibition presented the most comprehensive survey of Obata’s work to date, from California landscape paintings to intimate drawings of his experiences of the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.