Roy Kiyooka

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka (January 18, 1926 – January 8, 1994) was a Canadian painter, poet, photographer, arts teacher.

A Nisei, or a second generation Japanese Canadian, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and raised in Calgary, Alberta.

His parents were Harry Shigekiyo Kiyooka and Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka.

In 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the family moved to Opal, Alberta.

From 1946 to 1949, Kiyooka studied with at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art.

In 1955, he studied at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende.

In 1956, Kiyooka began teaching at the Regina College of Art.

From 1957 to 1959, Kiyooka took part in the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops of the University of Saskatchewan, where he worked with famed art American critic Clement Greenberg and abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman.

He moved to Vancouver in 1959, and began to shift his practice away from painting and towards photography and eventually filmmaking.

Kiyooka used the ellipse form in the Art Gallery of Ontario's Barometer No. 2 (1964).

In 1965, he represented Canada at the Eighth Sao Paulo Biennial.

In 1969, he created the sculpture, Abu Ben Adam’s Vinyl Dream, for the Canadian pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan.

In 1971-1972 he taught at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax; he documented his trip across the country to Halifax in the work Long Beach BC to Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, which formed part of his 1975 Transcanada Letters.

He also made16 Cedar Laminated Sculpture series, shown alongside the Ottoman/Court Suite of silk-screen prints, at the Bau Xi Gallery in Vancouver in May 1971.

Books published posthumously include:

From 1973 to 1991, he also taught at the Fine Arts Department of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

In 1975, the Vancouver Art Gallery organized a twenty-five-year retrospective of his work.

That same year saw Kiyooka publish his Transcanada Letters, a book project which weaved together photography, his own letters and experimental writing to examine his experience of the nation as a second-generation Japanese-Canadian.

Roy K. Kiyooka: 25 Years (Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC), 21 November-16 December 1976.

In 1978, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Kiyooka’s Pear Tree Pomes, illustrated by David Bolduc (Coach House Press, 1987), was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award.

While in Japan, he made the StoneDGloves: Alms for Soft Palms photographic series, shown at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Roy Kiyooka: Accidental Tourist (Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough, Ont), 17–22 March 2005.

Roy's grandfather on the maternal side, a samurai Ōe Masamichi, was the 17th headmaster of the Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū school of swordsmanship.

Roy Kiyooka's brother Harry Mitsuo Kiyooka also became an abstract painter, a professor of art, and sometimes a curator of his brother's work.

Roy's youngest brother Frank Kiyooka became a potter.