Craig Nagasawa is a celebrated artist and educator whose mineral-pigment paintings, drawings, and installation work navigates the complexities of race, class, and memory. Using humor and a lighthearted touch to disarm stereotypes, he confronts the ongoing legacy of the incarceration, dispossession, and oppression of his Japanese American community. Grounded in everyday lived experience, his work offers alternatives to dominant narratives of American history, but, just as importantly, creates a space where Nagasawa can just be himself.
Nagasawa was brought up in Salt Lake City’s Japantown, where three generations of his family ran Sunrise Fish Market and Restaurant before the neighborhood was demolished and the community scattered in 1968. His recent paintings and drawings, including Goji Leaves Japantown (2020-22), explore the repercussions of these historical events on his life in a playful manner using the Japanese monster Gojira (Godzilla) as a stand-in for himself. Engaging in leisure activities such as skiing, motorboating, fishing, going on dates, and prowling the streets of Japantown, this empathetic figure creates a space for viewers to engage with painful histories and embodies Nagasawa’s search for belonging and engagement with contemporary Asian American narratives.
Nagasawa is known for his deep engagement with traditional Japanese nihonga painting techniques, which include carefully preparing a laminated silk and paper surface, grinding pigments from natural minerals, and using rabbit skin glue as a paint binder. This laborious craft allows him to affect the depth and texture of his colors. Some of the raw minerals used in his work were gathered during trips in the American West–in a very concrete way, his paintings are composed of his memories. Rediscovered during a visit to Japan, this way of working represents a deep connection to his family’s historical roots, yet embodies the estrangement inherent in identifying with two distinct cultures.
In 2023, Nagasawa began a new series of large charcoal drawings investigating the natural world–snowy mountains, blooming vegetation, and reflections on running water. A language of symbolic motifs soon emerged, including clocks, record players, gojira, and atomic mushroom clouds. Working on several related drawings simultaneously, making liberal use of the eraser, and documenting his unexpected discoveries with stop-motion animations, Nagasawa does not intend these to be static views of a landscape fixed with a final meaning. Rather, they represent an iterative, speculative way of working open to discovery and multiple solutions, one which parallels his mission of connecting the turbulent past to the troubled yet open-ended present. These provisional works confront the stereotyped perceptions of Japanese American identity with something closer and truer to the variety of individuals' lives. Juxtaposing playful and dreamlike elements with violent historical events, Nagasawa’s drawings invite the viewer into a deeper experience of his subjectivity and specific path through history.
Craig Nagasawa has had recent solo exhibitions at Roll Up Project, Oakland (2023); The Townsend Center at UC Berkeley (2015); b. Sakata Garo, Sacramento (2005); and extensively at Braunstein Quay Gallery, San Francisco (2002-09). Group exhibitions include See You Space Cowboy… From Hokusai to Hiphop at San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery (2023); various exhibitions at 120710 Gallery, Berkeley (2023-24); and at Bivins Gallery, Dallas; the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Berkeley; the Positive Care Center, UC San Francisco, and others.
His work was included in the catalog Roll Up Project: The Early Years (2023), and an in-depth interview, Meeting Gojira, was published in “Works and Conversations” (2019). Nagasawa was the Honorary Chair of Kala Art Institute’s Annual Benefit Auction in 2022, was awarded a Berkeley Civic Grant in 2021, a UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015, and a Fellowship with Art Matters, New York.
Professor of Painting for 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley Department of Art Practice, Nagasawa teaches drawing and painting, including the craft of grinding mineral pigments. He was Founding Director of ArtBridge (BtheArts), which increased access to arts education by bringing student art instructors to local elementary schools. He received his BFA from the University of Utah in 1979 and his MFA from UC Davis in 1983. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.