Roy Kiyooka

Roy Kenzie Kiyooka CM RCA (January 18, 1926 – January 8, 1994) was a Canadian painter, poet, photographer, arts teacher.^[1]

A Nisei, or a second generation Japanese Canadian, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and raised in Calgary, Alberta.^[1] His parents were Harry Shigekiyo Kiyooka^[2] and Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka.^[3] Roy's grandfather on the maternal side, a samurai Ōe Masamichi, was the 17th headmaster of the Musō Jikiden Eishin-ryū school of swordsmanship.^[3] Roy Kiyooka's brother Harry Mitsuo Kiyooka also became an abstract painter, a professor of art,^[1] and sometimes a curator of his brother's work. Roy's youngest brother Frank Kiyooka became a potter.^[2]

In 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the family moved to Opal, Alberta.^[2]

From 1946 to 1949, Kiyooka studied with at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art.^[2] In 1955, he studied at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende.^[1] From 1957 to 1959, Kiyooka took part in the Emma Lake Artists' Workshops of the University of Saskatchewan,^[1][4] where he worked with famed art American critic Clement Greenberg and abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman.^[5]

In 1956, Kiyooka began teaching at the Regina College of Art.^[1] He moved to Vancouver in 1959, and began to shift his practice away from painting and towards photography and eventually filmmaking.^[5] 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.^[5] From 1973 to 1991, he also taught at the Fine Arts Department of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.^[2]

Kiyooka used the ellipse form in the Art Gallery of Ontario's Barometer No. 2 (1964).^[6] In 1965, he represented Canada at the Eighth Sao Paulo Biennial.^[7] In 1969, he created the sculpture, Abu Ben Adam’s Vinyl Dream, for the Canadian pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Japan.^[2] In 1975, the Vancouver Art Gallery organized a twenty-five-year retrospective of his work.^[2] 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.^[5] In 1978, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.^[7] Kiyooka’s Pear Tree Pomes, illustrated by David Bolduc (Coach House Press, 1987), was nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award.^[7]

While in Japan, he made the StoneDGloves: Alms for Soft Palms photographic series, shown at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. ^{[citation needed]} 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.^[2]

• Kyoto Airs. designed and printed by Takao Tanabe at Periwinkle Press, Vancouver 1964. (Inspired by a visit to Japan in 1963).^[1]
• Dorothy Livesay: The Unquiet Bed. Illustrations by Roy Kiyooka.
• Nevertheless These Eyes. Printed at the Coach House Press, Toronto 1967.^[1]
• The Fountainebleau Dream Machine: 18 Frames from A Book of Rhetorick. Coach House Press, Toronto 1977
• “Wheels, a trip thru Honshu’s Backcountry” was published by Coach House Press, Toronto 1981.
• StoneDGloves. Coach House Press, Toronto 1970. Repr.: 1983.^[8]
• transcanada letters. Talonbooks, Vancouver 1975. Repr.: 2004.
• Pear Tree Pomes 1987. Illus. by David Bolduc. Coach House Press, Toronto 1987. Nominated for the 1987 Governor General Award.

Books published posthumously include:

• Daphne Marlatt (ed.): Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. NeWest Press, Edmonton 1997. Roy Kiyooka's mother, Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka's, story from a series of interviews by Matsuki Masutani and reworked by Roy Kiyooka.^[2]
• Roy Miki (ed.): Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka. Talonbooks, Burnaby, B.C. 1997.
• Smaro Kambourelli (ed.): Pacific Rim Letters. NeWest Press, Edmonton 2004.
• Roy Miki (ed.): Roy Kiyooka: The Artist & the Moose: A Fable of Forget. LINEbooks, Burnaby, B.C., 2009.

Roy Kiyooka: Accidental Tourist (Doris McCarthy Gallery, Scarborough, Ont), 17–22 March 2005.^[9][10]

Roy K. Kiyooka: 25 Years (Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC), 21 November-16 December 1976.^[11]

• 1973 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award^[12]

• Kent Lewis: Kiyooka, Roy Kenzie. In: William H. New (editor): The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002, p. 582f
• MacDonald, Colin S. (1991). A Dictionary of Canadian Artists, vol. 3 (Third ed.). Ottawa: Canadian Paperbacks Publishing. Retrieved April 3, 2021.
• National Film Board of Canada. B.C. Almanac(h) C-B. Vancouver: Presentation House Gallery, Reprint edition, 2015 (1970). ISBN 9780920293973 OCLC 1031772338
• John O'Brian, Naomi Sawada, Scott Watson (ed.): All Amazed: For Roy Kiyooka. Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, B.C., with Belkin Gallery, 2002
• Michael Ondaatje (ed.): "The Long Poem Anthology", 1979
• Vancouver Art Gallery: Roy K. Kiyooka: 25 Years, 1975
• Woloshyn, Alexa. “Playing with the Voice and Blurring Boundaries in Hildegard Westerkamp’s “MotherVoiceTalk”.” eContact! 14.4 — TES 2011: Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium / Symposium électroacoustique de Toronto (March 2013). Montréal: CEC.

• Roy Kiyooka at The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan
• Roy Kenzie Kiyooka at BC Bookworld
• All Amazed: For Roy Kiyooka
• Records of Roy Kiyooka are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books
• Roy Kiyooka Fonds at the University of Regina Archives and Special Collections
• Kiyooka, item at English-Canadian writers, Athabasca University