Tokio Ueyama

Tokio Ueyama (1889-1954) was an oil painter who created realistic landscapes, still-lifes and portraits, and exhibited extensively in prewar San Francisco and Los Angeles, before he was incarcerated at Amache , Colorado.

Ueyama was born on September 22, 1889, in Wakayama, Japan, and immigrated to the United States when he was eighteen, in 1908, to study art. He enrolled at the California School of Design (formerly known as the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute) and attended classes there from November 1909 to February 1910. ^[1]

In 1910, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the University of Southern California, graduating with a degree in fine arts in 1914. He continued his studies by enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1917, before he was chosen to receive a Cresson travel scholarship that enabled him to travel and study painting in France, Germany, Italy and Spain for a semester. He sailed to Europe on July 18, 1920 and documented his trip with photographs and a written journal. ^[2]

After three months, Ueyama returned to Philadelphia to complete his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, finishing in 1921 and returned to Los Angeles in 1922. In Los Angeles, he quickly became part of a artistic community based in Little Tokyo , co-founding an art association named "Shaku-do-sha," dedicated to "the study and furtherance of all forms of modern art" ^[3] with fellow artists Hojin Miyoshi, Sekishun Masuzo Uyeno, and the poet T.B. Okamura. Throughout the '20s and '30s, Ueyama exhibited widely across the West Coast, resulting in enthusiastic reviews of his work in the press. In 1922, he exhibited three paintings at the second exhibition of the East West Art Society at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and participated in the annual series Painters and Sculptors of Southern California, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art (now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.) In 1924, he traveled to Mexico and exhibited his paintings in Mexico City, mounted his first solo show at the Sumida Music Store in Los Angeles, and sent twenty-five paintings to a gallery at the University of Oregon, which generated more reviews. ^[4] The next year, he returned to Mexico for the summer and spent time with muralist Diego Rivera while befriending other American artists. He married Suyeko Tsukada, who sat for Ueyama's Portrait in Black (Mrs. Ueyama) , on July 23, 1928, at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California. Despite his successes, a 1930 census of Los Angeles shows that he worked as a salesman in a bookstore (Bunrido bookstore, located in Little Tokyo) to support his painting, which must have been fit around his work schedule. In 1937, he went to Japan for a lengthy visit, acting as an art ambassador for the Los Angeles Art Association, charged with developing relationships that might result in future exhibition exchanges, but returned to the United States in time to participate in the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

In 1942, with the declaration of Executive Order 9066 , he and his wife Suye were held first at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in California, and then at Amache, Colorado. One of his best-known works, The Evacuee , depicts Suye crocheting in the open doorway of their barrack home at Santa Anita. He took part in exhibitions at both locations, and at Amache, he supervised the camp art department with Koichi Nomiyama , instructing fellow incarcerees in watercolors, charcoal, and oils multiple times daily, three days a week. ^[5] The paintings Ueyama produced in camp were less documentary and more formal, ranging from portraits to landscapes, both inside and outside the camp.

After the war, Ueyama returned to Los Angeles, where he and Suye opened the gift shop BunkaDo (which translates to "house of culture"), located on East First Street in Little Tokyo, selling art supplies and paintings by local Japanese American artists, including himself. He also formed the Los Angeles Palette Club with other artists in November 1946, hosting annual exhibitions in Little Tokyo in 1947 and 1948. ^[6] Active in community affairs, he headed the arts and crafts committee for the annual Nisei Week festival in 1951.

He died on July 12, 1954, in Los Angeles at age seventy-one. The Bunka-Do store still survives today and thrives in Little Tokyo, and is now owned and operated by Irene Tsukada Simonian, Tokio and Suye's niece, and managed by Dane Ishibashi, the Ueyama's great grand-nephew.

In 2023, the Tokio Ueyama papers were donated to the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art by Ueyama's niece, Grace Nozaki. These documents include, a family tree, travel documents, identification cards, records related to the WWII incarceration, correspondences, and a diary and notebook from Ueyama's time as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Also included are ephemera related to his artistic career, a sketchbook, and photographs of family and friends during a trip to Japan. Select entries from the diary have been translated into English by Noriko Okada.

A major exhibition titled The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama was organized by and held at the Denver Art Museum from July 28, 2024 - June 1, 2025, which produced an online digital catalog in a limited print edition. Essays by curator JR Henneman and art historian ShiPu Wang were included in the catalog that detailed a timeline of Ueyama’s life and offered a bibliography of print and online resources. Another retrospective exhibition, Stars in the American Night Sky: Tokio Ueyama and His Artistic Milieu , is scheduled to be held at the Von Karman Gallery, UC Irvine Langston Institute and Museum of California Art from September 2026 - January 2027.