Kenjiro Nomura (artist)

Kenjiro Nomura was born in 1896 in Gifu, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. In 1907, his family immigrated to the United States, settling in Tacoma, Washington. When he was sixteen, his parents returned to Japan, but Kenjiro chose to remain in the U.S.

In 1916, Nomura moved to Seattle and started working for a shopkeeper in the city's bustling Japantown / Nihonmachi neighborhood (later known as the International District). Within a year, he began working as an apprentice sign painter (most likely with Burgira Hirayama, the only known professional sign painter in Japantown at that time). He began taking lessons in the studio of Fokko Tadama, a prominent art teacher who instructed Nomura in the basic techniques of Western Art. A Dutch-Indonesian immigrant himself, Tadama often worked with Japanese-American students.^[2]

In 1922, after five years of study with Tadama, Nomura had some of his paintings selected by the Seattle Fine Art Society for inclusion in its Annual Exhibition of the Artists of the Pacific Northwest. The same year he and a friend, Show Toda, opened a sign painting business in Japantown. The following year they moved it to Sixth Ave. and Main St., in the heart of Nihonmachi, where it would remain for the next thirteen years. Combining their names, they called it Noto Sign Co.^[3] It soon became a successful business and a studio and hang-out for artists, as well as Nomura and Toda's home. Notable Nikkei artists who worked and socialized there at various times included Takuichi Fujii, George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, and Kamekichi Tokita.^[4]

After Toda got married and moved on in 1928, Tokita took his place as Nomura's business partner. The two men, who had met around 1921, would become inextricably linked, their very different ways of painting similar subjects providing contrast and context to each other's work. Long after their deaths their paintings would continue to be exhibited side by side.

In the 1920s Seattle's arts community was growing with an energy that continued even through the early years of the Great Depression. Nomura and his peers regularly appeared in the Seattle Art Institute's 'Northwest Annuals', and when the Seattle Art Museum opened in 1933, its first solo exhibition was of Nomura's work (both SAI and SAM, under the directorship of Dr. Richard Fuller, were descendants of the Seattle Fine Art Society). His work was also shown at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery, and, as his reputation spread, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.^[5]

Nomura married in 1928, at which time he moved out of the Noto building.^[6] He and his wife Fumiko had a son, George, in 1930.^[7]

In 1935 Nomura was invited to join the Group of Twelve, a cooperative gathering of progressive artists including Kenneth Callahan and Ambrose Patterson. The Group's exhibitions proved popular, and several were held over the next couple of years.^[8]

Despite his successes as an artist, the deepening Depression was taking its toll. In 1933 he was happy to be paid $38.25 a week to produce several paintings for the federal Public Works of Art Project, some of which were shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 1936, lack of business forced Nomura to close down Noto Sign Co.; he and Fumiko were eventually able to reestablish themselves by managing a dry-cleaning business in Seattle's University District.^[9]