🌄 Find a quiet moment in Chiura Obata’s watercolor paintings  Obata’s long, influential career as a Bay Area artist and professor. Obata was a Japanese immigrant who arrived in San Francisco in 1903 and spent the next seven decades depicting the natural world around him, from the lakes of the High Sierras to the morning glories blooming at his Berkeley home.  In the early 1940s, Obata’s tenure as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was interrupted when he and his family were imprisoned. At Tanforan Racetrack and Topaz incarceration camp, he painted the distraught world around him while founding art schools serving nearly a thousand students.  Obata eventually returned to Berkeley, where he resumed his university position until his retirement in 1954. He became a naturalized citizen that year, his faith in California’s “Great Nature” unwavering and his hope in the idea of America still alive.  See more of Obata’s works in our collection with the link in bio. [Ch...