{"id":35341,"date":"2014-01-09T21:14:54","date_gmt":"2014-01-09T21:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35341"},"modified":"2017-06-13T20:42:02","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T20:42:02","slug":"qa-with-tim-okamura-a-painter-with-a-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35341","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Tim Okamura: A Painter with a Purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q&A with Tim Okamura: A Painter with a Purpose<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

SCA Close Up: News and Events From the School of Visual Arts<\/a>
\nSchool of Visual Arts, New York, New York<\/a>
\n2013-08-29<\/p>\n

An eclectic heritage, a penchant for hip-hop, and life as an artist in New York City set <\/em>Tim Okamura<\/em><\/a> (MFA 1993 Illustration as Visual Essay) on a path toward social consciousness. Collected by celebrity clients (including Uma Thurman<\/a>, Questlove<\/a> and John Mellencamp<\/a>) and exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery<\/a> in London, his portraits are meant to \u201ccontribute a positive voice to the conversations going on today.\u201d Okamura\u2019s paintings in \u201c<\/em>The Pond, the Mirror, the Kaleidoscope<\/em><\/a>\u201d depict a trio of female boxers, suggesting women\u2019s plight for equality and justice.<\/em><\/p>\n

SCA: You\u2019re known for your paintings of African American women.\u00a0 You\u2019re half-Japanese, half-Caucasian and you grew up in Canada. Many of your paintings celebrate the New York street scene. How did this juxtaposition come about?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tim Okamura:<\/strong> It\u2019s a question that comes up often\u2014and it\u2019s really not a short answer for me\u2014and it\u2019s very intriguing to me that there are people who tend to find the juxtaposition of the work, and who I am, quite \u201cconceptual.\u201d It\u2019s something I hadn\u2019t fully considered when I began making the work. The idea that there would be an intertwining assessment of both model and artist when looking at the work was vaguely in the back of my mind, but it never influenced my choices. As someone who has focused primarily on portraiture up to this point in my career, I think the biggest factor in choosing my subjects has always just been a deep interest in the \u201cstories\u201d of the people I paint. I consider portraiture a form of story-telling as it relates to the subject, and I really wanted to discover or reveal to my audience stories that I felt were compelling, and perhaps had not been told previously…<\/p>\n

…I think there is an additional layer of psychological interest for me in that my vision is filtered through the lens of my personal experience as someone of mixed race growing up in Canada. I was often identified as being \u201cdifferent\u201d and even persecuted for this perception. As a result, I tended to form friendships with minority kids and anyone who might have felt excluded from the \u201cmainstream.\u201d This has had a significant impact on my view of the world, my desire for social justice and equality, and my long-standing motivations as an artist who is interested primarily in people…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An eclectic heritage, a penchant for hip-hop, and life as an artist in New York City set Tim Okamura (MFA 1993 Illustration as Visual Essay) on a path toward social consciousness. Collected by celebrity clients (including Uma Thurman, Questlove and John Mellencamp) and exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London, his portraits are meant to \u201ccontribute a positive voice to the conversations going on today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,16,13743,8,20],"tags":[16719,16718,16720,16721],"class_list":["post-35341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-asia","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-sca-close-up","tag-sca-close-up-news-and-events-from-the-school-of-visual-arts","tag-school-of-visual-arts","tag-tim-okamura"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35341"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54225,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35341\/revisions\/54225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}