Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Installation, Video
Website: craignagasawa.com
Craig Nagasawa was raised in Salt Lake City’s Japantown, where three generations of his family ran the Sunrise Fish Market and Restaurant until the neighborhood was demolished and its community scattered in 1968. He earned a BFA from the University of Utah in 1979 and an MFA from UC Davis in 1983, and has lived and worked in the Bay Area for more than three decades, based in Berkeley.
Nagasawa taught painting and drawing for 30 years in UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, where he trained generations of students in the traditional craft of grinding mineral pigments, and he served as founding director of ArtBridge (BtheArts), an initiative that expanded arts education access in elementary schools. His teaching was recognized with UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015.
Over his career Nagasawa has received an Art Matters Fellowship (New York, 1996), a Berkeley Civic Grant (2021), and a Purchase Award from the Utah Arts Council (1981), and in 2022 he was named Honorary Chair of the Kala Art Institute’s annual benefit auction. His work is held in private and public collections in the United States, Switzerland, and Japan.
Nagasawa’s practice centers on nihonga-influenced painting: hand-grinding raw minerals gathered on trips through the American West and applying them, along with ink, to laminated silk, Japanese paper, linen, and canvas, alongside charcoal drawing, installation, performance video, and animation. His work navigates the complexities of race, class, and memory, using humor and a lighthearted touch to disarm stereotypes and confront the legacy of incarceration, dispossession, and oppression experienced by Japanese American communities.
A recurring device in his work since 2014 is Gojira (Godzilla), whom Nagasawa casts as a stand-in for himself, sending the monster skiing, boating, fishing, and dating in scenes that use humor to open space for viewers to engage with painful histories. His large charcoal drawings, including depictions of his family’s Sunrise Fish Market, employ the traditional Japanese “blown-off-roof perspective” to reveal both a building’s exterior and interior simultaneously, layering multiple generations of family history into a single image.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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