One of many ongoing projects with the Crow Collection of Asia Art is a series of portraits of visiting artists, speakers and curators. The Crow showed a stunning collection of Roger Shimomura’s work and hosted and evening with Roger last summer. I made this portrait in my studio while Roger was in town. Below is a narrative biography taken from Roger’s personal website – rshim.com:
Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theatre pieces address sociopolitical issues of Asian America and have often been inspired by diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother for 56 years of her life.
Shimomura received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and his M.F.A. from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 125 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. He is the recipient of more than 30 grants, of which 4 are National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art. Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lectured on his work at more than 200 universities, art schools, and museums across the country. In 1999, the Seattle Urban League designated a scholarship in his name that has been awarded annually to a Seattle resident pursuing a career in art. In 2002, the College Art Association presented him with the “Artist Award for Most Distinguished Body of Work,” for his 4 year, 12-museum national tour of the painting exhibition, “An American Diary.”
The following year, he delivered the keynote address at the 91st annual meeting of CAA in New York City. In 2006, he was accorded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the School of Arts & Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle. A past winner of the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award, in 2008, he was designated the first Kansas Master Artist and the same year was honored by the Asian American Arts Alliance, N.Y.C. as “Exceptional People in Fashion, Food & the Arts.”
Shimomura began teaching in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS in 1969. In the fall of 1990, Shimomura held an appointment as the Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota.
In 1994, he became the first Fine Arts faculty member in Kansas University’s history to be honored as a University Distinguished Professor. In 1998, he was the recipient of the Higuchi Research Award, the highest annual research honor awarded to a faculty member in Humanities and Social Sciences. In the fall of 2002, he received the Chancellor’s Club Career Teaching Award for sustained excellence in teaching and dedication to students at KU. In 2004 he retired from teaching and started the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to foster faculty research in the Department of Art at KU.
Shimomura is in the permanent collections of over 80 museums nation wide.
His personal papers and letters are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is represented by The
Flomenhaft Gallery, New York City; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle; and Jan Weiner Gallery, Kansas City.
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Here is a list of relevant links:
Roger Shimomura on Artnet
The Crow Collection of Asian Art
Archives of American Art
Flomenhaft Gallery
Greg Kucera Gallery
Jan Weiner Gallery
Chris Korbey Photography