Japanese American Artist Helen Oji’s kimono paintings added to collection
OZ Art NWA has acquired three artworks by Helen Oji from Estrada Fine Art. These highly regarded paintings from Oji’s “Kimono” series were first exhibited at the Monique Knowlton Gallery in New York in 1982 and will be on view on a rotating basis in Bentonville, Ark. Japanese American artist Oji burst onto the 1980s New York art scene with her “Kimono” series shortly after moving there in 1976 from her hometown of Sacramento, Calif. Oji has folded multiple sheets of paper in what she has described as a “pseudo-origami process” to build kimono-shaped canvases that were then thickly layered with acrylic and rhoplex to incorporate textured, arresting images of Japanese iconography and natural phenomena, like volcanos and swarms of bees.