Masao Kondo

Issei Masao Kondo (1893-1973) was born in Tokyo to Genji Kondo and Kimi Baba and immigrated to the United States in 1913 at the age of twenty. He moved into the Los Angeles area, and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute to study painting. He married Kikue Kamei on December 15, 1929, in Huntington Beach, California. According to the 1930 Census, he was living with his wife Kikue at 126 Palmetto Drive in Los Angeles and listed his occupation as an office clerk for a chemical fertilizer company, and his wife worked as a ʻdecorator.ʻ

During World War II, he continued his art practice, sketching and painting watercolors scenes while incarcerated at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in California and the concentration camp at Jerome , Arkansas. Some of his surviving work from camp include works with crayon on paper depicting everyday life in camp such as the guardhouse, an amateur theater performance and an art class, although it is uncertain whether he developed any of his drawings into finished paintings. After he was released from Jerome, he and his wife briefly lived in Cleveland, Ohio, before they returned to Los Angeles.

Kondo died in July 1973 in Los Angeles at age 81.