From DiscoverNikkei.org

Chiura Obata

Chiura Obata with children at Tanforan.
Gift of the Obata Family, Japanese American National Museum (94.88.1)

Sumi-e painter & printmaker (1885-1975)

Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was born in Japan to a family of artists and decorators. He began his formal training in art at the age of seven and apprenticed with painters of the Shinjo, Tosa, and Kano Schools. By the turn of the century, Obata became involved with the nihonga movement, a new approach to painting which incorporated aspects of Western technique with traditional Japanese aesthetics. Obata immigrated to San Francisco in 1903, where he was active in the vital arts scene through the 1930s. In 1921, along with other Japanese American artists, he founded the East West Art Society. In 1932, he was appointed a professor at UC Berkeley where he taught until 1954, with the exception of his World War II incarceration years.

"The Great Nature of Chiura Obata": Sierra Nevada Wilderness Education Project web site
Profile: Castle Fine Arts, Inc.
"Lecture and Interview with Kimi Kodani Hill": Asian American Curriculum Project
Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment. Heyday Books (publisher) web site
Photographic profile by G. Paul Bishop, portraitist; includes articles on Obata from the Berkeley Gazette and Berkeley Voice.
Kim Kodani Hill, "Renovation of the Japanese Pool". University of California Botanical Garden Newsletter vol. 23, no. 1 (Winter 1988).

Profiles Chiura and Haruko Obata and their long relationship with landscape architect Geraldine Knight Scott.

Patricia Cambron, "The Nature of Beauty". California Monthly, November 2000.
"Dust Storm: Art and Survival in a Time of Paranoia": one-man play by Rick Foster based on Obata's experiences at the Topaz internment camp.