The son of Japanese immigrants, Matsumi Kanemitsu was born in 1922 in Ogden, Utah, but spent his childhood with his grandparents in Hiroshima, Japan, where he took near-daily art classes. He moved back to the United States in 1940 and joined the U.S. Army in 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor soon led to his arrest and confinement in detention camps. Devastating as that experience must have been, Kanemitsu began drawing with art supplies provided by the American Red Cross and eventually made his way to Europe as a military hospital assistant. Kanemitsu returned to the United States in 1949 and plunged into New York’s postwar art scene. But as a student of Japanese painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League, he also kept in touch with his cultural heritage. By the early 1960s, he moved to Los Angeles and received a grant to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, producing a suite of prints that translated sumi painting techniques into lithography. With extraordinary skill and versatility, Kanemitsu also became a teacher, at Chouinard Art Institute from 1965 to 1970 and at Otis Art Institute from 1971 to 1983. Though Kanemitsu is often identified as a second generation Abstract Expressionist, his artistic legacy is bicultural, embracing Japanese ink painting traditions as well as American Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. | 
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