CHIURA OBATA (1885–1975)
Tenaya Peak (3,141m - 10, 306ft)
Unites States of America (California)
In Death’s Grave Pass and Tenaya Peak in the background, High Sierra, 1930, Color woodcut
About this painting
Obata did at least two paintings mentioning Death's Grave Pass which appears to be somewhere northeast of Pywiack Dome, northwest of DAFF Dome. It is on no map. We have used Obata's descriptions of paintings to locate other sites where he obviously painted from.
The mountain
Tenaya Peak (3,141m - 10, 306ft) is a mountain in the Yosemite high country, rising above Tenaya Lake. Tenaya Peak is named after Chief Tenaya, who met the Mariposa Battalion near the shores of the Tenaya lake. The Mariposa Battalion under Captain John Boling expelled Chief Tenaya and his people from what was to become Yosemite National Park.
The artist
Chiura Obata (小圃 千浦 ) was a well-known Japanese-American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent over a year in internment camps.
After his retirement, he continued to paint and to lead group tours to Japan to see gardens and art.
Posthumous exhibitions of Obata's works have been organized at the Oakland Museum, The Smithsonian Institution, and, in 2000, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, a retrospective of 100 ink and brush paintings, large scrolls and color woodblock prints. In 2007 there was an exhibit in Yosemite National Park. The museum collection at Yosemite National Park contains several Obata prints of the park (see above). The Smithsonian American Art Museum organized an exhibition of Obata's Yosemite woodblock prints, which was shown at the American Art Museum in Washington, DC in early 2008 and then traveled to the Wichita Falls Museum, Wichita, TX (2008) and Federal Hall National Memorial, National Park Service, in New York, NY (2009).