Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints and theatre pieces address socio-political issues of Asian America and have often been inspired by 56 years of diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington in Seattle and his graduate degree from Syracuse University, New York. He has had over 100 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and The Smithsonian Institution. He is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in painting and performance art, a McKnight Fellowship, the Kansas Governor’s Artist Award, a Civil Liberties Public Education Fund Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and was the first artist internationally to be awarded a Japan Foundation Grant, as well as the first in the state to receive the Kansas Arts Commission Artist Fellowship in Painting. In the fall of 1990, he was appointed the Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. Professor Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lectured on his work at almost 200 universities and art museums across the country. In 1999, the Seattle Urban League designated a scholarship under his name that since has been awarded annually to a Seattle resident that is pursuing a career in art. Recently, the College Art Association presented him with the Artist Award for Most Distinguished Body of Work for 2001, for his 4 year,12 museum national tour of the painting exhibition, “An American Diary”. In February, 2003 he delivered the keynote address at the 91st meeting of that association in New York City. At the University of Kansas where he taught since 1969 he was designated a University Distinguished Professor in 1994, the first so honored in the history of the School of Fine Arts on that campus. He has been awarded 20 general research grants from his university, and in 1998, was the recipient of the Higuchi Research Award, the highest annual honor bestowed upon a faculty member in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In the Fall of 2002, he received the Chancellor’s Club Career Teaching Award for sustained excellence in teaching and dedication to students at the University of Kansas. He 2004 he retired frrom teaching and started the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to support faculty research in the Department of Art. Shimomura’s personal papers are being collected by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He is represented by The Flomenhaft Gallery, New York City, Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, Miami, and Jan Weiner Gallery, Kansas City.
