Frank Taira: The Color Inside

Sullivan Goss

AN AMERICAN GALLERY

Text by: Jeremy Tessmer Book design: Jeremy Tessmer Photography by: Edgard Rincon

Nathan Vonk Edited by: Frank Goss

Susan Bush Š 2011 Sullivan Goss, Ltd. Santa Barbara, California Second Edition This catalog was published in conjunction with the exhibition Frank Taira: The Color Inside that took place from March 3 to May 29, 2011.

Sullivan Goss AN AMERICAN GALLERY

TABLE OF CONTE NTS I N T RO D U C T I O N

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T H E CO LO R I N S I D E

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by F r a n k G os s

by J e r e my Te s s m e r

R E M A R K S

H i d d e n i n P la i n S ig h t 14

T h e Sy n ch r o m is t C o n n e c t i o n 26 BIOGR APHY 41 E X H I B I T I O N H I S TO RY 45 M E M B E R S H I P S /CO L L E C T I O N S /AWA R DS 47 B I B L I O G R A P H Y 48

INTRODUCTI ON In the summer of 2007, I received a call from a woman in New York City who had found a painting by Frank Taira on our web site. True, we had shown one of his paintings in a 2005 exhibit, “Scenes of American Labor: 100 Years of American Labor in Art.” His painting celebrated a powerful vision of American steel workers assembling a skyscraper.

Clean, clear, precise, it was an obvious commemoration of labor and its fruits.

His paintings were stored in specially built shelves in his large apartment overlooking Central Park. His helper pulled out paintings for an hour and Frank described where and when each was created. His diction was colorful, even poetic. His habit of thinking carefully before replying was endearing. Other than his hearing loss, there was no sign of his advancing age.

The three of us had tea and I left to return to my journey. It was a great treat to meet an American who had overcome his years in an arid WWII internment camp. He had overcome prejudice. He had the courage to follow a career as a painter when there was little demand for the work of Japanese Americans. He also had the courage to let his artistic efforts evolve in several distinct styles over his career.

At the age of 93, he still treasured each and every painting from his 60 year career.

The caller introduced herself as a health care worker who looked after Frank Taira. As Taira was born in 1913, I was pleased to hear he was alive. The caller invited me to come and visit Frank. Three months later, on November 26, 2007, I arrived in New York City and took a cab to his building. It was on 5th Avenue in a very fashionable district. The building was dedicated to helping senior citizens who required care.

Frank, at the age of 93, was strikingly handsome, vibrant and fit. He carried himself briskly, like an athlete. His back was straight and his eyes were clear. However, not all was well.

He was experiencing severe hearing loss and his memory was flighty. Some thoughts and memories came quickly and some were beyond his ability to recall.

I exchanged a few letters with the caller over subsequent years. Then came a final notice. This delightful American, at the age of 97, had died on the nation’s birthday, July 4, 2010.

An American internment prisoner living out his life on 5th Avenue with a fabulous view of the Park – the irony was powerful. His death, on July 4th, was the final satire.

- Frank Goss

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THE COLOR IN SIDE THE STORY OF A LOST ARTIST Beneath the summary understanding of twentieth century art history lies a rich vein of artistic production in which excellence and influence sometimes diverge, in which loops and tangles confound a straight line understanding of the time line, and in which the singularity of certain creative projects exposes the flimsiness of our grand, cohesive myths.

Schemes to frame art in terms of aesthetic theory or to organize it along an axis like culture can be useful in trying to understand art in its time or place, but these are blunt tools with which to interpret an individual. There are too many good artists whose work is not yet well known or well understood because the work or the artist don’t fit neatly within a school or a well worn cultural narrative. Somehow, some people just slip between the cracks.

and contemporaries either gave him short shrift or no space at all. His self-portraits (one above right) and his portraits of his daughter (above left) celebrate specific ethnic identity, but his abstract work has a more obscure connection to the history of Japanese art or the construction of AsianAmerican identity.

Frank Taira and his paintings represent just such a case. His identity is bifurcated. He is both American and Japanese. In an era of overt racism, his Japanese ethnicity was problematic in terms of career opportunities, while his adoption of an international Modern style and ethnically neutral themes and subjects seem to have excluded him from the investigations of subsequent histories of specifically Asian-American art.

Many of the books celebrating Taira’s Asian-American peers

Taira’s simultaneous interest in Cubism and Realism in 1957 does not fit many conventions of the progression of painting in the mid twentieth century. The two styles represent radically different expressions of Taira’s identity as a painter.

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While the more abstracted paintings were in line with known currents of American Modernist painting, a number of the Realist pictures spoke more to his attempt to express or locate some kind of identity. He painted a number of Realist self-portraits over the course of his life and he either painted his daughter multiple times or else he reworked her image as she got older. He may have learned to accept the unlikely harmony of the two approaches from his teacher at the California School of Fine Arts, Otis Oldfield (18901969). Oldfield was known for both his Cubist works and for his Realism.

agenda. Sheer visual delight no longer suffices. Virtuosity is suspect. Quality is passé.

For the seasoned art lover, the pleasures to be had fromTaira’s paintings are abundant. Their quality needs no explanation.

It is the discovery of curiosities like these that make the study of art such a wonderful and rewarding experience.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TAIRA’S ART Taira began his development as an artist at the California School of Fine Arts under Otis Oldfield, Victor Arnautoff (1896-1979) and Lee Randolph (1880-1956) - three artists united stylistically only in their reverence for the craft of figure painting. Of these, Oldfield seems to have had the most pronounced effect, though Arnautoff ’s Expressionistic paintings advocating for social equality and expansive humanism clearly affected Taira early on in his career.

Thus, the narratives and agendas of curators and gallerists brushed up against Frank Taira without ever fully embracing him. His particular responses to the art world and the political climate of the era testify to the distinct difficulties Taira faced as a Japanese American artist in the years after the war.

In turn,Taira’s exclusion from these histories colored people’s perception of the work. In the era in which we live, paintings are read as much as seen. The narrative foregrounds the painting. The work must not only carry a story, but the story must interact with other well known stories or support an

The best evidence of this influence can be found in one of Taira’s most widely documented paintings, Bunny (left), painted in 1943. It’s survival

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both as a work of art and as a photographic document of Taira’s work from the dark war years owes to the fact that it won first prize in an art contest sponsored by a Quaker group from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The pathos of the despondent Japanese woman suggests Arnautoff ’s influence, while various stylistic elements from Cézanne suggest Oldfield’s pull. Interestingly enough, the subject matter decidedly advocates for Japanese American agency. Taira’s approach to the issue was more circumspect after the war.

his vision and a few insights to be gleaned from the study of his contemporaries.

One such contemporary was Sueo Serisawa (19102004). Serisawa was born in Yokohama, Japan and immigrated to Los Angeles when he was eight years old. Poor Sueo was unlucky enough to open a solo show at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (the precursor to the LA County Museum of Art) on December 7, 1941 - the exact day that the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor.

Serisawa quickly fled to New York to escape incarceration and returned to his home in Los Angeles soon after the war. Seen in this light, it is interesting to note that his career seems to have suffered measurably less from the disruption of war than did Taira’s. The maintenance of both agency and personal assets was pivotal.

Other artists who might have influenced Taira during the war years include Miné Okubo (1912-2001), whose artwork had a strong social activist bent during her years in the Topaz internment camp. Taira taught with her there. Her work of the 1950s and 60s would also explore abstract figuration and abstract composition of geometric forms. It may be telling that she developed in parallel to Taira after the war in New York.

Taira’s connection to other diasporic Japanese artists is confined to the area of conjecture since he passed away without leaving a very detailed account of his career or his peer group. At this point, we have obvious visual connections left in the work to understand the formation of

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Taira’s painting features wild horses - a culturally ambiguous symbol than stands as both an icon of the American West and as one the signs of the Japanese and Chinese zodiac.

From the rise of Japonisme in Europe in the early 1870s, Western culture had built a place for artists whose work blended Western and Eastern themes and aesthetics. Artists such as Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1893-1953) and Masami Teraoka (b. 1936) built successful careers within this construct, even if some of their work questioned the political dynamics that characterize Japonisme.

Taira’s work did not conform to that template. He was a Modern artist, pursuing an artistic agenda that is often described in terms of its internationalism and universal themes. While his race may have limited his career, it did not define his art. Much of the literature on Taira contains the quote, “...all art must resort to personal feelings, the harmony and vision within you.” It is that vision that we celebrate, one that is both expansive in its embrace of the pluralism of the American experience and nuanced in its depiction of his own experience. He made paintings that honored the color inside as much as the color outside.

- Jeremy Tessmer

Above left is a picture of Serisawa’s painting “Figure (Mary)” painted in 1951. It was widely exhibited and was similar in both palette and Cubist approach to several of Frank Taira’s paintings of the 1950s, notably Two Horses, 1957 (above).

The strong black lines and organization of form around the triangle strongly link the two works, but where Serisawa’s painting features a Japanese woman in a kimono doing Ikebana - the traditional Japanese art of flower arranging,

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Spanish Dancer, 1952 24 x 20 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Stocking Cap - Self Portrait, 1957 25 x 22 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Two Horses, 1957 20.75 x 25.5 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Reading Room, 1959 35 x 40 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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HIDDE N IN PL AIN SIGHT Taira’s early Post War forays in painting owed significant aesthetic debts to the ideas of the Cubists and Expressionists. Paintings like Two Horses, 1957 (at left, or p.9) have both the strong angular lines and bold coloration that often signify Expressionist leanings as well as the intriguing and confusing figure/ground relationship favored by Cubists. Finding the horses in the image above is no easy feat, but the painting is made much more dynamic by the eye’s exercise.

This idea of hiding a representational foreground image in the painterly tumult of an abstracted background was not Taira’s alone, but it does find a special resonance with him and his place in the world. Author Daniel Cornell noted that “the fragmentation and dislocation within modernist approaches to representation, especially abstraction, carry particular resonance for many American artists of Asian ancestry.” 1 Hiding in plain sight in The Reading Room, 1959 (at right) is a man working at a drafting table, illuminated by

a desk lamp. A small female figure peers over the edge of the desk. Another figure in a triangular hat hovers off on the right. There is even an implication of one or two other figures standing and leaning above the figure at the desk. It is either a crowded room, or Taira is experimenting with the idea of simultaneity, suggesting several positions of the same figure at different times superimposed onto one image. The rest of the canvas is covered in black rectangles that create little cages for vibrant color. At a distance, they read as an impossibly large and wonderful library. Perhaps the figure is Taira and perhaps the little girl is his daughter Yoshiko (see page 34).

As a California artist displaced by internment,Taira may have felt like he was lost in New York, where he lived after the war. He may also have felt as though his American identity was hidden behind a Japanese appearance. The metaphor of concealing and revealing develops a special relevance in this strange and seductive body of work.

Gordon H. Chang, Daniell Cornell, Karen Higa, Sharon Spain, ShiPu Wang, Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970.

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University of California Press, 2008. p. 204-213.

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Running Horses, 1960 22 x 28 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Juggler, 1960 40 x 30 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Festival II, 1960 40 x 50 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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San Francisco Harbor, 1961 30 x 40 inches | oil on canvas signed lower left

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Seashore, 1961 38 x 42 inches | oil on canvas signed on reverse

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THE SYNC RHOMI ST CONNECTI ON As a gallery partially devoted to the research, promotion and sale of American - and specifically Californian - modern paintings, it is hard not to draw a connection between the early 1960s paintings of Frank Taira and the Synchromist paintings of artists like Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973).

This connection was not just borne of observation, but of specific inquiry into Taira’s intention. When gallery owner Frank Goss asked one Taira’s last close friends about what Taira might have said about his own work, she wrote, “The major thing that Frank said about the paintings made up of shapes of colors is that the colors come together in music. I understand that there was a period in painting where it was talked about in this way.”1 Indeed.

In 1913, Americans Macdonald-Wright and Russell held their first exhibition of Synchromist paintings at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris.2 Deeply versed in color theory, the two developed the first American theory of non-objective, abstract art. Basically, Synchromism posits an absolute

relationship between the Western musical scale and color, where musical harmonies (or chords) are translated directly into colors, which advance or recede into space according to whether the colors are warm or cool.

It then begs the question, how did Taira come into contact with Synchromist ideas? There are several possible answers. John Emmett Gerrity (1895-1980) was an avowed Synchromist who studied with Macdonald-Wright at the Art Students League in Los Angeles3 before going on to teach at the California School of Fine Arts where Taira was studying in the late 1930s.4 Alternatively, Taira may have seen a Synchromist exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1931. If Taira was influenced by either contact, it would not appear in his painting until seven years after the war.

Taira was also good friends with another Japanese American artist, Hideo Date (1907-2005), who was another avowed acolyte of Macdonald-Wright through the LA Art Students League. Date continued to experiment with Synchromist works into the 1970s.5 Perhaps Taira was moved by the Synchromist paintings on

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Synchromism is an attempt to make of painting an emotional art, such as music; and all of its canvases are worked out in color harmonies, to which its progenitor [Macdonald-Wright] applies the musical term orchestration.

- Anthony Anderson, “Art and Artists,� Los Angeles Times, 23 November 1913.

exhibit at the Pioneers of Modern Art in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1946.6 He would have had numerous opportunities to see other exhibitions at the Rose Fried Gallery in New York throughout the 1950s7 or at Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951.8 There was also a significant article written about Synchromy in Art News in 1951.9 Macdonald-Wright, himself, returned to the style in the early 1950s after abandoning it years earlier and Gerrity continued to work in that style into the 1950s and 60s.

It may also be significant that Taira was trained in both music and painting while he lived in San Francisco. He studied voice and classical guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the mid thirties.10 Was Taira a Synchromist? At the time of this publication, there is no documentation from the artist himself about his knowledge of Synchromism, much less his admiration. These observations are offered as curiosities to make the paintings more interesting, even if they can’t necessarily explain them.

Image at top left on page 24: STANTON MACDONALD-WRIGHT (1890-1973) Synchromy [detail], c. early 1950s 10.5 x 4.5 inches | oil on canvas Currently at Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery Image at left: JOHN EMMETT GERRITY (1895-1980) Portrait of Dr. Gustave B. Henno, 1955 29 x 23.5 inches | oil on canvas Photograph courtesy of Spencer Helfen Fine Arts Email from D. Weinstein to Frank Goss dated January 23, 2011 Will South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism. North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001. p. 204-213.

3 Scott Shields, Susan Landauer, John Natsoulas,Vanessa Bolden, C.L.Ysuph, David J. Carlson, San Francisco and the Second Wave. Crocker Art Museum, 2004. p. 94.

4 Will South, Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, Julia Armstrong-Totten, Wesley Jessup, A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906-1953.

Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2009. p. 105.

5 Karin Higa. Living in Color: The Art of Hideo Date. Japanese American National Museum, 2001. p. 23.

6 Will South, Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism. North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001. p. 204-213.

7 ibid 8 ibid 9 ibid 10 Michael Brown. Views From Asian California 1920-1965. San Francisco, 2004. p. 57.

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Guitar Player, 1962 40 x 35 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Guitarist, 1962 40 x 35 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Forest, 1963 26 x 20 inches | oil on canvas signed lower right

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Construction Workers, ND 30 x 15 inches | oil on canvas signed lower left

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Yoshiko, ND 20 x 16 inches | oil on canvas signed lower left

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BIOGRAPHY Frank Morihiko Taira was born on August 21, 1913 in San Francisco, California of Japanese parents. He was born Nisei, a first generation American of Japanese descent. While he was still in high school, his parents decided to move the family back to Japan. Young Frank Taira made the decision to stay in the US. Determined to make his life in America, he managed to work his way through high school as a “house boy.”1

Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). His instructors at CSFA included some of the Modernist powerhouses of the West Coast art scene: Victor Arnautoff, Otis Oldfield and the director of the school, Lee Randolph. Concurrently, Taira trained in voice and classical guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory for Music.3 How he managed to pay for the additional studies is something of a mystery. It seems likely that his talent for music may also have merited some kind of scholarship.

In 1939, he exhibited at a juried show at the San Francisco Museum of Art and at the Oakland Municipal Gallery. In 1940, he won first prize in an exhibition at the CSFA. In 1941, he exhibited with the San Francisco Art Association.

He was developing a good reputation in the Bay Area art scene and his future seemed bright.

Wanting to continue his studies beyond high school, Taira entered an illustration competition for a local Japanese newspaper. The $50 first prize allowed him to enter classes at the storied California School of FIne Arts in 1935.2 The $50 couldn’t take him very far, but his professors saw great promise and arranged for him to continue on with scholarships.

Shortly thereafter, he got his first big break. Taira was offered a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The exhibition was never mounted.

Through 1938, Taira studied at the California School of Fine

On February 19, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed

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Executive Order 9066, ordering the immediate detention and eventual incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-American citizens living in the western United States. Stories abound of trucks simply pulling up outside the homes of Japanese Americans and hauling residents away. The body of work painted for the San Francisco Museum of Art exhibition is now lost to time along with most of Taira’s work done before the war. It is a common story among Japanese-American artists of the period.

Taira was then briefly detained at the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California before being transfered to the Central Utah Relocation Center in Topaz, Utah. Tanforan was nothing more than a horse racetrack surrounded by chain link fences and barbed wire, but artists like Taira, Chiura Obata (1885-1975), and Hideo Date (1907-2005) nevertheless managed to open the Tanforan School of Art in just six days.4 It would become part of a successful strategy for survival in the desert of Utah.

In the arid desert ofTopaz, Utah,Taira would come into contact with many of the West Coast’s best Japanese-American

artists, including Chiura Obata, Miné Okubo, (Yuzuru) Henry Sugimoto (19001990), and (Matsusaburo) George Hibi (1886-1947).

The art school developed at Topaz was unusually large and sophisticated when compared with organizations developed within other “relocation centers.”5 In 1943, Frank Taira entered a competition sponsored by a Quarker organization called the Friends Center in Cambridge, Massachussetts. It was open to all members of the camp.

Taira won first place for his painting of Bunny (above).

When Taira was released, he joined many others in moving to New York City, where he remained for the rest of his life.

He would continue his education at Columbia University in 1945, the Arts Students League, and the New School for Social Research in 1957. He exhibited as often as he

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could and won awards from time to time. Among the more prestigious institutions to offer him exhibition opportunities were the National Academy of Design, the Salmagundi Club, and the Biennale Internazionale Bell’Arte Contemporanea in Florence, Italy.

the contributions of other Japanese American artists who had lived through internment and succeeded despite the interruption to their careers.

Many of these artists, including Hideo Date, Benji Okubo (1904-1975), Henry Sugimoto and Hisako Hibi (George Hibi’s wife, 1907-1991) donated substantial portions of their Estates to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. While their donations helped to promote cross cultural understanding, they also prevented collectors or other institutions from acquiring work.

In the mid 1960s, the artist mostly abandoned his experiments with abstraction and returned to a strict Realism. He would enjoy a run of exhibition opportunities throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He was also an avid designer of jewelry during the same period and worked for the Charles China Decorating Company.

Frank Taira passed away in New York city in 2010 at the age of 97. In 2011, Sullivan Goss mounted the first posthumous exhibition for the artist.

1 FRANK TAIRA. Online article at: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/ nikkeialbum/albums/206/slide/ 2 FRANK TAIRA. Online article at: http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/ nikkeialbum/albums/206/slide/ 3 Michael Brown. Views From Asian California 1920-1965. San Francisco, 2004. p. 22.

4 Karin Higa. The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942-1945. Japanese American National Museum. p.

5 ibid. p. 30.

In 1992, he was offered his first significant California exhibition through the efforts of private collector Michael Brown and the Garzoli Gallery in San Rafael. The exhibition was concommitant with an effort by many to historicize

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E XHIBITI ON HI STORY 1939 1939 1940 1941 1943

1953 1954 1955 1955 1959 1959 1960 1962 1962 1967 1968 1968 1968 1969 1969 1970 1970

1971 1976

San Francisco Museum of Art, CA Oakland Municipal Gallery, CA California School of Fine Arts, CA San Francisco Art Association, CA Relocation Center Art Exhibit, Friends Center, Cambridge, MA Collectors of American Art, Inc., NY National Arts Club, NY National Arts Club, NY Collectors of American Art, Inc., NY RT Directions Gallery/RTS Center Gallery, NY Arts Center Gallery/Art Directions Gallery, NY Arts Center Gallery/Art Directions Gallery, NY Gimbels, NY Knickerbocker Artists, National Arts Club, NY Hudson Arts Guild Gallery, NY National Arts Club, NY Knickerbocker Artists, National Arts Club, NY Emily-Lowe Foundation, Syracuse, NY (solo) F.A.R. Gallery National Arts Club, NY National Arts Club, NY First Annual New York International Art Show, Armonk, NY Knickerbocker Artists, National Arts Club, NY National Academy of Design, NY

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(SELECTED LIST) 1976 1976

1977 1978

1980 1981 1982 1984

1985 1987 1989 1992

1998

1999

2001

2005 2009 2011

Allied Artists of America, NY Painters & Sculptors Society of New Jersey, National Arts Club, NY Knickerbocker Artists, National Arts Club, NY International Society of Artists First Annual Juried Art Show, National Arts Club, NY Caravan House Gallery, NY, NY (solo) Accademia Italia delle Arti e del Lavoro Horizon Galleries 7th Annual Open Juried Exhibition for NonMembers, Salmagundi Club, The Center for American Art, NY The Marseilles, NY (solo) Audubon Artists, NY Society of Landscape and Figurative Artists “Frank Taira: The Evolution of an American Artist”, Garzoli Gallery, San Rafael, CA (solo) Biennale Internazionale Bell’Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy “Frank Taira: Small Works”, Artsforum Gallery, NY (solo) Biennale Internazionale Bell’Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy Hudson Arts Guild Gallery, NY (solo) Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, CA Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, CA (solo)

ME MBE RSHIPS/COLLECTI ON S/AWARDS COLLECTIONS Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA Michael Brown Collection, San Francisco, CA Sullivan Goss Collection, Santa Barbara, CA MEMBERSHIPS Artists Equity Association of New York Painters and Sculptors Society of New Jersey AWARDS 1940 First Prize, California School of Fine Arts 1943 First Prize, “Relocation Center Art Exhibit”, Friends Center, Cambridge Massachussetts 1968 Award, National Arts Club 1968 Honorable Mention, Knickerbocker Artists 1987 The Robert Philipp Memorial Award, Audubon Artists

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BIBLI O GR APHY Brown, Michael. Views From Asian California: 1920-1966: An Illustrated History.

San Francisco, CA: ACR Édition Internationale.

Chang, Gordon H., Cornell, Daniel, Higa, Karen, Spain, Sharon, and Wang Shipu., Karen Higa, Sharon Spain, ShiPu Wang.

Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970. University of California Press, 2008.

Johnson, Mark Dean, Chang, Gordon, Karlstrom, Paul. Asian American Art: A History 1850-1970.

Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.

Higa, Karin. Living in Color: The Art of Hideo Date.

Berkeley, CA: Japanese American National Museum, 2001.

Higa, Karin. The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942-1945.

Los Angeles, CA: Japanese American National Museum, 1992.

Kim, Kristine. Henry Sugimoto: Painting An American Experience.

Berkeley, tCA: Japanese American National Museum, 2000.

Shields, Scott, Landauer, Susan, Natsoulas, John, Bolden, Vanessa, Ysuph, C.L., Carlson, David J. San Francisco and the Second Wave.

Sacramento, CA: Crocker Art Museum, 2004.

South, Will, Yoshiki-Kovinick, Marian, Armstrong-Totten, Julia. A Seed of Modernism: The Art Students League of Los Angeles, 1906 1953. Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2009.

South, Will. Color, Myth, and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism.

Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001.

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Discover Nikkei. o2dangerguy. 2005.

2011 <http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/nikkeialbum/albums/206/slide/>.

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Frank Taira was born in San Francisco in 1913 as Nisei, a Japanese American of the first generation to be born in the United States. While he was still in high school, his parents decided to move the family home to Japan.

Young Frank was too enamored of the US. He elected to stay, working to pay his way through school.

He would end up entering and winning a newspaper contest for illustration. The cash prize funded his first quarter at the storied California School of Fine Arts. His teachers were so impressed that they arranged for him to stay on with scholarships.

In May of 1942, Tairaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rapid ascent in the art world of San Francisco was halted by Executive Order 9066 the infamous order requiring the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese American citizens. This is his art and his story.