Chiura Obata (小圃千浦, 1885–1975) was born Zoroku Sato in Okayama, Japan. In 1899, at age fourteen, he ran away to Tokyo to pursue his studies in art and adopted the name "Chiura," referring to the scenic "thousand bays" on the coast near Sendai, where he had lived with his older brother (who was also his adoptive father and an artist). Obata immigrated to the United States in 1903 and embarked on a seven-decade career, emerging as a leading figure in the Northern California art scene. He was an influential educator for more than twenty years and acted as the founding director of art schools in two Japanese concentration camps during World War II.

Obata found enduring inspiration in California’s rich and diverse landscape. His initial years in the Golden State may have included a brief period working in the Sacramento Valley’s fields, which he referenced in a large scroll painting of a fiery sunset above an expansive horizon. When Obata first arrived in San Francisco, he briefly enrolled at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art but left because he found the attitude and lack of rigor of his fellow students disappointing. For his first job in the city, he took a position as domestic worker for Edwin Emery, an actor at the Alcazar Theater, and later found work making illustrations for newspapers.

After the earthquake of 1906, Obata grabbed his sketchbooks and set up a shelter at Lafayette Square, ready to document the event. He was recruited to wait tables at the martial law headquarters, and with his position was able to travel freely throughout the city. Obata produced over fifty sketches of the devastation.

After the recovery, he worked a variety of jobs. He was involved in public art, decorating Union Square for the 1913 Portola Festival, and again found work in publishing in 1915, making illustrations and covers for a monthly magazine titled Japan. In 1922, Obata invited Nilsen Laurvik, Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA), to his home to discuss the creation of a joint exhibition of Japanese, American, Chinese, and Russian painters. The exhibition was held on March 3, 1922, and showed work from thirty-seven members of the East West Art Association, the artist collective founded by Obata and his friends.

In 1927, he took a month-long sketching tour of Yosemite National Park with fellow artists Worth Ryder (1844–1960) and Robert B. Howard (1896–1983), and produced more than 150 paintings as a result. Obata began teaching in the art department at University of California, Berkeley, in 1932 and retired there in 1954. Although his career as an artist and educator was ultimately marked by great success, his experience as an immigrant was not without challenges. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1917 and Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 fueled xenophobic sentiments, which intensified after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans and Obata and his family were detained at the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, and later moved to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. A disciplined artist, Obata nevertheless continued his work, and many of his ink drawings document the displacement of Japanese Americans. These works and his writings were later published by his granddaughter, Kimi Kodani Hill, in Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment (2000).

_{Notes:
Image: Chiura Obata, Great Nature: Storm on Lyell Mountain from Johnson Peak, 1930, Woodblock print, ink, and colors on paper. Crocker Art Museum, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Kodani, 1994.25.1}

_{"Chiura Obata: An American Modern," ARTLETTER 29, no. 2 (2019): 20–22.}

_{Chiura Obata papers, 1891-2000, bulk 1942-1945. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.} 
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/chiura-obata-papers-17607

_{Fujii, Masuji, Kimi Kodani Hill, and Akiko Shibagaki, “Excerpt of an Oral History Interview with Chiura Obata, 1965,” in Chiura Obata: An American Modern, by ShiPu Wang. University of California Press, 2018.}