Koho Yamamoto

Masako Yamamoto was born in Alviso, California, on April 14, 1922.[3] Her mother died when she was just four. She spent her early elementary school years in Japan and returned permanently to live in the United States in 1931 when she was nine years old. Her father was a poet and a calligrapher.[4] In World War II, as a result of widespread anti-Japanese hostility and the issuance of Executive Order 9066 by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she and her father and siblings were forcibly imprisoned in three different internment camps,[2] places of detainment established by the federal government for people of Japanese ancestry living on the west coast of the United States. They moved from the Tanforan Assembly Center in California to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah and then back again to California where they were last incarcerated at the Tule Lake Segregation Center.[3]

In 1942, while confined at Topaz, Yamamoto studied with the renowned artist and University of California, Berkeley professor, Chiura Obata and became his apprentice. Like Yamamoto, Obata's family was displaced after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and forced to move to a camp. Obata started a school at the prison and it was there that he taught Koho and gave her her artist's name which means "Red Harbor."[1][2][5] His gesture was also recognized as a symbol of spiritual succession.[6]

After the war, Yamamoto moved to Manhattan and studied at the Art Students League of New York. During this period, an art critic gave accolades to her work as fantastic dark landscapes. Isamu Noguchi also complimented her pieces, I find your paintings to be exceptionally beautiful.

In 1973, she founded the Koho School of Sumi-e on the corner of Macdougal and Houston Streets in New York City where she taught traditional Japanese ink painting techniques. In 1977, she exhibited at the Educational Alliance Art School.[7] In 1989, her paintings were displayed with those of other internees and noted artists like Henry Sugimoto and Miné Okubo at a show in Hastings-on-Hudson that recounted the persecution of Japanese-Americans after World War II.[8] Throughout her lifetime, Koho Yamamoto had her work exhibited 15 times.[9]

Although her school closed in 2010, she still produced artworks.[1][2] In 2021, she exhibited 10 abstract paintings at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in a show called Koho Yamamoto: Under a Dark Moon.[10] She has exhibited at the Leonovich Gallery in New York[1] and one of her paintings is in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Yamamoto recently celebrated her 101st birthday and has been profiled on numerous occasions in the New York Times. She continues to paint and teach.[1] To start, all her students must paint bamboo. “I tell them to make their minds into nothingness,” she said.[1]

Blue Koho Yamamoto Painting at the National Museum of American History