Acclaimed painter and printmaker Roger Shimomura will give a multimedia presentation about his 40-year career as part of the StudioVU lecture series at Vanderbilt University.

Shimomura’s presentation at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, in 103 Wilson Hall on the Vanderbilt campus, is free and open to the public. The lecture is part of StudioVU, a lecture series sponsored by the Studio Arts Department at Vanderbilt. The Center for East Asian Studies is also a sponsor.

The presentation, An American Diary, surveys Shimomura’s paintings, prints and experimental theater pieces and shows how they have been propelled by historical and political events, his collection of Walt Disney memorabilia and World War II stereotypes of Asian people.

“After years of studious concern over content, I feel that I have either reached or sunk to a level of security where ideas for my work flow, unconscionably,” Shimomura said. “It seems that at some point I no longer felt compelled to project my own point of view toward the things that concerned me. I found myself more interested in creating a visual forum that expressed ironic and contradictory attitudes towards these concerns.”

Shimomura is the University Distinguished Professor of Art, Emeritus, at The University of Kansas. He has had more than 125 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces, at venues including the Franklin Furnace in New York City, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and The Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

For more information on Shimomura, go to www.rshim.com/index.htm.

Audio of the lecture will be recorded for podcast on VUCast, the Web site of Vanderbilt News Service, at www.vanderbilt.edu/news/.
  
Contact: Jim Patterson (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu