Ben Sakoguchi

Ben Sakoguchi was born in San Bernardino, in California in 1938. In December 1941, when he was just three years old, Japanese forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States entered the war and from then on harboured strong resentment towards citizens of Japanese origin. Suspected of espionage and sabotage, 120,000 civilians were interned in detention camps. Ben Sakoguchi spent his childhood in one of these camps in Poston (Arizona). At the end of the war, his family returned to San Bernardino and reopened, not without difficulty, the small grocery shop they had been forced to leave. One of Sakoguchi's earliest influences was the orange crate labels stacked behind his parents' shop. Between 1974 and 1981, he produced over two hundred paintings based on these labels, which enabled him to paint a gritty portrait of America. Combining images from advertisements, films and newspapers, he revealed the underside of the great American dream: discrimination, prejudice and violence, particularly towards minorities. In 1979, the artist was invited by the Claude Monet Foundation to come to France. He stayed in Giverny and took advantage of its proximity to Paris and northern France to take a series of photographs. He also collected old photographs and drew inspiration from the work of the great masters, whose masterpieces he sometimes imitated. This was the beginning of a new series, Postcards from France, in which art confronts war and the present confronts the past. Sakoguchi is a graduate of UCLA in Los Angeles. He taught at Pasadena City College until his retirement. He has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his work can be found in major American collections: MoMA, Chicago Art Institute, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington), etc.