Marilyn

A prolific painter and printmaker, Roger Shimomura was born in Seattle, but, like the majority of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, was incarcerated as a child with his family due to anti-Japanese hysteria during World War II. He spent ages 3 to 5 in the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho. That experience, and the everyday racism he was to encounter in later life, became an underlying theme in much of his work. He developed a style with roots both in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and in Pop Art. His work is often confrontational, tackling racism and stereotyping through subtle irony or absurdist exaggeration.

Shimomura has said “Andy Warhol was my biggest influence, both visually, historically, and stylistically.” Marilyn features visual quotations from Warhol’s silkscreen paintings, but uses them to raise questions of otherness, self-perception and identity.