Kenjiro Nomura (artist)

In 1916, Nomura moved to Seattle and started working for a shopkeeper in the city's bustling Japantown / Nihonmachi neighborhood (later known as the International District).

[2] In 1922, after five years of study with Tadama, Nomura had some of his paintings selected by the Seattle Fine Art Society for inclusion in its Annual Exhibition of the Artists of the Pacific Northwest.

Combining their names, they called it Noto Sign Co.[3] It soon became a successful business and a studio and hang-out for artists, as well as Nomura and Toda's home.

Notable Nikkei artists who worked and socialized there at various times included Takuichi Fujii, George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi, and Kamekichi Tokita.

The two men, who had met around 1921, would become inextricably linked, their very different ways of painting similar subjects providing contrast and context to each other's work.

[7] In 1935 Nomura was invited to join the Group of Twelve, a cooperative gathering of progressive artists including Kenneth Callahan and Ambrose Patterson.

In 1933 he was happy to be paid $38.25 a week to produce several paintings for the federal Public Works of Art Project, some of which were shown at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.

[9] Japanese immigrants in general were subject to discriminatory U.S. laws which barred them from owning property or becoming naturalized citizens.

Very few of his internment camp paintings utilized the blended, dark colors which gave a heavy tone to much of his previous work.

Nomura did not paint until 1947, when another local Japanese artist, Paul Horiuchi, helped him to recover from his losses and return to art.