San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Explore the work of Chiura Obata, one of California’s most important twentieth-century artists. In this exhibition, forty jewel-like watercolors, woodblock prints and ink paintings trace Obata’s long, influential career as a Bay Area artist and professor. Obata was a Japanese emigre who arrived in San Francisco in 1903 and spent the next seven decades depicting the natural world around him, from the lakes in the High Sierras to the morning glories blooming at his Berkeley home. In the early 1940s, Obata’s tenure as a professor at UC Berkeley was interrupted when he and his family were imprisoned at an incarceration camp. He painted the world around him him while there and founded art schools, but eventually he returned to Berkeley where he remained a professor until his retirement in 1954. The exhibition remains until July 14, 2024.

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