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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 later in life, became an underlying theme in much of his work. His paintings and prints are often confrontational, tackling racism and stereotypes using subtle irony or absurdist exaggeration.