 – Scheduled to close at the John Young Museum of Art, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on Wednesday, December 7, 2022, “The Graphic Works of Tetsuo Ochikubo,…){kind=link}
MANOA, HI (PNAN) – Scheduled to close at the John Young Museum of Art, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on Wednesday, December 7, 2022, “The Graphic Works of Tetsuo Ochikubo, 1956-1970” is the first solo exhibition to survey the work of Hawaiian-born artist Tetsuo Ochikubo (1923–1975) in almost 50 years, and the only one to focus exclusively on his printmaking.
Ochikubo was among a select group of painters and sculptors who pioneered the art of lithography in American Post-War abstraction. Through over two dozen prints and previously unexhibited documents, this exhibition looks at printmaking as a central site of Ochikubo’s extensive artistic experimentation.
His earliest prints were made when he worked as a designer for silk-screened Hawaiian textiles at Alfred Shaheen’s Surf ’n Sand Hand Prints. Later as the supervisor of the Graphics Workshop at the Art Students League of New York from 1960–61, and his use of lithography as a means of promoting his exhibitions at Krasner Gallery between 1958–1967, led to him investigating lithography in the fine art context.
As time went on in his life, lithography was a key component of Ochikubo’s pedagogy as a professor of Fine Art at Syracuse University and the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. Although he was better known as a painter and sculptor, he was never far from a printing press until his untimely passing in 1975.
About
Tetsuo Ochikubo, also known as Bob Ochikubo (b. 1923, Waipahu, HI; d. 1975, Kawaihae, HI) was a Japanese-American artist who worked in painting, sculpture and printmaking. After serving in France and Germany in the 442nd Infantry in World War II, Ochikubo studied art under the G.I. Bill at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1947–48), the Art Students League of New York (1951–52; 1956–60), and Pratt Institute (1960). He was a founding member of Honolulu’s “Metcalf Chateau,” pioneers of modern art in Hawaii. He took part in the Whitney Annual (1959), and was a Tamarind Institute Artist’s Fellow in 1961. He received an MFA in printmaking from Syracuse University in 1968, where he also taught as an assistant professor of fine art. Ochikubo’s prints can be found in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; and the archives of the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM.