Roger Shimomura

Roger Shimomura
Shimomura in 2009
Born	Roger Yutaka Shimomura 1939 (age 77–78) Seattle, Washington
Alma mater	University of Washington; Syracuse University
Website	www.rshim.com

Roger Shimomura (born Roger Yutaka Shimomura in 1939 in Seattle) is an American artist and a retired professor at the University of Kansas Lawrence, having taught there from 1969 to 2004. His art, showcased across the United States, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Israel, often combines American popular culture, traditional Asian tropes, and stereotypical racial imagery to provoke thought and debate on issues of identity and social perception.

He is represented by the Flomenhaft Gallery, New York City, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Eight Modern Gallery, Santa Fe, and Byron C. Cohen Gallery, Kansas City.

He was born on June 26, 1939, in the Shimomura family home in Seattle's Central District. He was delivered by his grandmother, Toku, a professional midwife who would become an important figure in his life and art. His father, Eddy Kazuo Shimomura, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Aya, was a homemaker. Both parents were U.S.-born nisei whose parents had emigrated from Japan in the early 1900s.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of Japanese incarceration, his family was forcibly relocated and incarcerated at Camp Harmony in Puyallup, Washington, then transported to the more permanent Minidoka camp in Idaho. After about two years at Minidoka, the family moved to Chicago (outside the West Coast Japanese exclusion zone), where Shimomura's father had secured a job in a pharmacy. The family lived there for a few months before returning to Seattle at war's end in 1945. Shimomura's younger sister Carolyn had died of meningitis during their stay in Chicago.