Chiura Obata was a prominent Japanese American painter and educator, known for his landscapes and paintings depicting the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. Obata’s decades-long career found popularity despite navigating the hostility towards the Japanese through his unique convergence of Eastern style and Western subject-matter.

Born as Zoroku Sato on November 18, 1885 in Okayama Japan, he left home at the age of 14 to study at the Japan Art Institute, where he honed his skills in Japanese ink painting and Western styles. He arrived in the United States in 1903, settling in San Francisco and working as an illustrator for Japanese newspapers and magazines. Obata began his well-known work on landscapes of the Sierra Nevada in the 1920s, and by 1928, he had his first American exhibition. Despite the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Obata continued to paint while interned at the Topaz War Relocation Center, where he founded an art school for the internees.

After the war, he returned to San Francisco where he was a founding member of the East West Art Society, and resumed his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a professor of art from 1932 to 1954. He also continued to paint, and he traveled extensively throughout the United States and Asia. Obata died in Berkeley, California, on October 6, 1975. He is considered one of the most important Japanese-American artists of the 20th century. His paintings are held in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.