Jerry T. Okimoto

Laminated white pine and plywood sculpture by Jerry T. Okimoto in the Hawaii State Art Museum

Jerry T. Okimoto (Jerry Tsukio Okamoto, 1924–1998)^[1] was a Japanese-American painter and sculptor who was born in Waianae, Hawaii.

Double image[]

Okamoto is best known for his minimalist works consisting of several solid colored, geometrically shaped pieces of stretched canvas fitted together to form a single work. Since these works are essentially two-dimensional, they challenge the distinction between painting and sculpture. Double Image further challenges this distinction, in that it is totally abstract, but strongly suggests a vanishing point. In some of these works, the individual stretched canvases are moveable and are intended to be rearranged.^[2] He also created non-moveable minimalist sculptures (such as laminated white pine and plywood sculpture in the Hawaii State Art Museum).

Mobile Painting #5, acrylic on canvas painting with moveable panel by Jerry T. Okimoto, c. 1975

Along with Satoru Abe, Bumpei Akaji, Edmund Chung, Tetsuo Ochikubo, James Park, and Tadashi Sato, Okimoto was a member of the Metcalf Chateau, a group of seven Asian-American artists with ties to Honolulu.^[3]

The Hawaii State Art Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Michelson Museum of Art (Marshall, Texas), the University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor, Michigan),^[4] and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City) are among the public collections holding work by Jerry Okimoto. Jerry Okimoto died in 1998.

Footnotes[]

References[]

• Baur, John I. H. (1974). Whitney Museum of American Art Catalogue of the Collection. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. OCLC 646297717.
• Morse, Marcia (2001). Legacy: Facets of Island Modernism. Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts. pp. 70–75. ISBN 978-0-937426-48-7. OCLC 50993176.

See also[]

• Metcalf Chateau
• Satoru Abe