Roy Kiyooka
| Roy Kiyooka | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Roy Kenzie Kiyooka January 18, 1926 Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan |
| Died | January 4, 1994 (aged 67) Vancouver, British Columbia |
| Awards |
Order of Canada Silver Medal at the Eighth Sao Paulo Biennial |
Roy Kenzie Kiyooka, OC (January 18, 1926 – January 4, 1994) was a Canadian arts teacher, painter, poet, photographer, and multi-media artist of national and international acclaim.
A Nisei or a second generation of Japanese Canadians, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and raised in Calgary, Alberta. His parents were Harry Shigekiyo Kiyooka and Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Roy's grandfather on maternal side, a samurai Ōe Masamichi, was the 17th headmaster of the Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū school of swordsmanship. Roy Kiyooka's brother Harry Mitsuo Kiyooka also became an abstract painter, a professor of art, and sometimes curator of his brother's work. Harry Kiyooka taught art at the University of Alberta in Calgary, now The University of Calgary, from 1961 to 1988. And Roy's youngest brother Frank Kiyooka became a potter.
In 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the family was uprooted and moved to a small town in rural Alberta called Opal. Roy Kiyooka was unable to finish high school.
From 1946 to 1949, he studied with Jock Macdonald and Illingworth Holey Kerr at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art. With a scholarship, he was able in 1955 to go to Mexico for eight months to study under James Pinto at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. In 1956 he began teaching at the Regina College of Art. In Regina he worked with a group of abstract painters, but Kiyooka left for Vancouver in 1959 and thus was not included in the group show coined the Regina 5'.
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