Identity, Culture, and the Art of Yasuo Kuniyoshi

FAIN: FB-52669-06

Gail Levin
CUNY Research Foundation, Bernard Baruch College (New York, NY 10010-5585)

I explore the dual cultural identities of the artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In 1906, he immigrated to the U.S. alone at age sixteen, eventually studying art. A cultural hybrid-- a blend of Euro-American and Japanese society-- Kuniyoshi can be best understood through the study of esthetics, folklore, literature, manners, education, politics, and material culture. I will write a monograph on Kuniyoshi, folk art, and cultural identity and edit a bi-national anthology of scholarship on Kuniyoshi. Chapters in my monograph will treat his Japanese childhood, his American education, his formative years, his brief Japanese sojourn, his mature years, and the war and post-war experience of a Japanese citizen in America.