Hiro: An Extraordinary Artist Embodies a Multicultural Perspective

EAST-WEST DIALOGUE is the dominant theme that
      threads through my artworks and reflects my cultural
      heritage. The multi-cultural perspective to my art
      expression has influenced how I view the process of art
      and the subjects I select to address in the language of
​      the visual arts. It is a life commitment to myself. 
Hiro, http://www.hiro-artist.com/   

I have one of this series, and treasure it.

While I was writing about Mine' Okubo and her art documenting the Japanese-American experience during the WWII Internment Camps, I remembered my dear friend Hiro, an artist and public humanities colleague from my days in Washington, DC. Hiro's art sprang up to me like the crocuses and daffodils now blooming in my garden. 

I am so glad this happened. Because Hiro is a visual  artist extraordinaire who introduced me to a wonderful world of multi-cultural expression. Her unique point of view fills her art and enlightens eveyone who sees it and hears her talk about it.     

Not that her art was ever far from my thoughts. I have a beautiful broadbrush painting of a Mother and Child that I prize to this day, from the series pictured here. So does my daughter Elissa, who now has it among her art collection, gracing her walls. It is a source of continuing joy.  

What I loved about Hiro's work then, and still do, is how her art, like her teaching and hundreds of public programs and performances, encompasses and illuminates issues of cultural diversity, race and gender, civil rights and justice, from the urban environment to the natural world. It is wonderful to learn that she is still doing this great work. Brilliant, constant, multicultural, universal. 

Like Okubo before her, Hiro is an American artist of Japanese ancestry. Her familial origins "are part of the history of Japan, traced from Genji to Meiji Japan and beyond. Her great, great grandfather was the founder and first mayor of Sapporo, an explorer of the Kuril Islands and a scholar." And like Okubo, Hiro melds the aesthetic, spirit and perspectives of her East-West heritage into her art, as in her life. That is what I always felt about Hiro's art.  Seeing it anew, with time and pespective, makes it even more engaging, more meaningful. Hiro was ahead of her time then and now. 

 

Hiro recalls being confronted with "the pain of prejudice" early on when she delivered her high school Valedictorian, The subject she chose was Executive Order 9066, the federal government's decision to round up and incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans into “internment camps” during World War II, including members of her family. She raised the question, “what is democracy and how does this policy conflict with the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the due process clause and equal rights under law.”  HIRO stood her ground. "Total Silence. Only my parents applauded proudly, ever so quietly," Hiro remembered.    

Throughout her broad-based University education, from science to the humanities, she held on to her vision of justice, culminating in choosing an art major at Columbia University, New York. From then on, art became HIRO’s primary commitment, her primary medium of expression. She became an art activist, "working for civil rights and justice through arts and culture."  

From  the 1970s, HIRO has been in the forefront of  the movement to introduce Asian American artists to the American art scene. As a young artist, she ran "a marathon of art activities, art exhibitions, and speaking engagements between New York and Washington, D.C."  She had many “firsts,” beginning in Manhattan with a solo exhibition of colorful 4-panel screen paintings in the 57th Street windows of Bergdorf Goodman. Before leaving New York City, HIRO recalled her "delight with the myriad of colors glittering in the night sky," which had enchanted her since childhood. This fascination influenced her to produce a series of Manhattan skyline paintings titled "City Lights, City Dreams." .

In the mid-1980s, when she moved to the Washington area, Hiro returned to the heartfelt and painful subject of her high school valedictorian address, Executive Order 9066.  Like Okubo, but not herself interned, she began a series of paintings she called "Kimono and Barbed Wire."  For me at the time, who knew so little about the Japanese Internment Camps, the art was both incredible and sad. There was the softness, delicacy and beauty of the kimono and the prejudice, injustice, and harsh reality of the illegal incarceration of American citizens of Japanese descent. It moved me, powerfully, at the time, to view art as a medium for the expression of social inustice and the hope for healing and change.   

Hiro, Incarceration, "Kimono and Barbed Wire" series

"Breaking Free"

This first exhibitions of “Kimono & Barbed Wire”  was a four-year (1993-1997) national museum tour, titled, “STRENGTH & DIVERSITY: Japanese American Woman 1885-1990,” with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, together with performance art program by HIRO. She was especially pleased that the series was featured at the 2010 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where she  painted a  24-foot "Kimono & Barbed Wire” mural in live performance.  She called it a "tour de force." 

With the ugliness of Asian-American prejudice rearing its ugly head, Hiro's point of view and her multi-cultural art are needed now more than ever.  "Through the culture of art,"  Hiro said at a talk at the Department of Justice, "we continue to extend our hands to all people in a circle of friendship."   

Main source: Hiro's autobiographical description of her life and work in  http://www.hiro-artist.com/