ANSEI UCHIMA (1921-2000)
Ansei Uchima was born in Stockton, California, in 1921. At the age of nineteen he traveled to Japan to study architecture at Waseda University, Tokyo, and was then stranded there by World War II. He studied painting in the early 1950s, and in 1954 he began to study historical Japanese prints. In 1957 he began to make his own prints, working in the tradition of the sosaku-hanga movement, begun in Japan in 1918; Uchima did his own carving, inking and printing of wood blocks, and was receptive to the chance effects that can be achieved working in this way. His images were derived from nature and his environment -- a world as diverse as a still life and a traffic jam. Throughout his career he applied the finely honed technical process to this abstract aesthetic. It can range from the highly expressionist Joy, 1958 to the still, Zen garden quality of Ripening, 1966.
In 1960 Uchima moved to New York City. In 1962 he began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. He taught there until 1982, and was named a Professor Emeritus in 1985. He also taught at Columbia University and Pratt Graphics Arts Center, NY, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Beloit College in Wisconsin. Uchima was married to the artist Toshiko Uchima. The artists Isamu Noguchi and Shiko Munakata were among their friends.
Uchima"s first one-man show was at the Yoseido Gallery, Tokyo, 1955. His New York show was at the Japan Society, 1962. Among his many additional shows were those at the Pratt Graphics Center, NY, 1970, Printmaking Council of New Jersey, Somerville, 1981, Sarah Lawrence College Museum, Bronxville, NY, 1985 and 1996, Associated American Artists, NY, 1988 and 1997, and the Striped House Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1989 and 1994. Here, at the Susan Teller Gallery, Uchima"s work was shown in American Color Woodcuts of the 1950s, 1994, The Great American Woodcut, 2003, and the one-man show, Ansei Uchima, Works of the 1950s to the 1980s, 2004
Among the numerous group exhibitions with work by Uchima were the Tokyo International Print Triennial, 1957; the Fifth Sao Paulo International Biennial, Brazil, 1959; the Print Annual Exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum NY, 1960 (the first of many shows at the Brooklyn Museum); 35th Venice International Biennial, Italy, 1970; 10th International Biennial of Graphic Art, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, 1973; Eight Hundred Years of Japanese Printmaking, Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 1976/77; Reflection, Images--Isamu Noguchi, Ansei Uchima and Toshiko Uchima, Hunterdon Art Center, NJ, 1980; the traveling exhibition, A Spectrum of Innovation, Color in American Printmaking, 1890-1960, Worcester Museum of Art, Massachusetts, 1990; Selections from the Collection: Prints from 1950 through the early 1960s, Whitney Museum American Art, NY, 1995; a two person show with Yozo Hamaguchi, Japan Print Association, Tokyo, 2001.
An extensive archive of woodcuts by Ansei Uchima is in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York. Among those additional permanent collections with work by Uchima are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and New York Public Library, NY; Albright Knox, Buffalo; the National Gallery of Art and Sculpture Garden and Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Wright Museum of Art, Beloit, and Elvehjem Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin; Art Institute of Chicago; Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, San Francisco; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and the British Museum, London.
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