‘Non-Stop Art’ an All-in-the-Family Affair for the Versatile Nakamuras

By all accounts, they are Whittier’s “first family of art.”

The Nakamuras--a diverse group of painters, photographers, illustrators and graphic designers--are synonymous with art in Los Angeles County’s southeast and San Gabriel Valley areas, especially at the long-running Hillcrest Festival of Fine Arts concluding today in La Habra Heights.

Despite growing national exposure and acclaim for several of the Nakamuras, the family has faithfully returned to the festival every year since Yoshio Nakamura first entered the show in 1962--the festival’s second year. This year is no different, as six family members are showing their works at the three-day exhibition, which began Friday.

“It’s a special show because it is where some of us got our start,” said Yoshio, who is dean of community services at Rio Hondo Community College. “It was one of the first shows my children entered.”

As a family, the Nakamuras could form their own culture club.

Sons Are Best-Known

Yoshio and Grace Nakamura’s two sons--Joel, 25, a commercial illustrator, and Daniel, 27, a specialist in the traditional paper craft of origami--have emerged as the family’s best-known artists.

The family’s East Whittier home is a cross between a museum and a studio, with family artifacts filling nearly every wall. Through the years, the house has been an incubator of ideas and expression for the couple’s three children, including their daughter, Linda Nakamura Oberholtzer, who was a news photographer and writer before becoming an attorney.

“Experimentation was always rewarded,” recalled Daniel, a high school math teacher in Los Angeles. “We were constantly creating.

“Every time there was an art opening . . . we went. Every time a new gallery opened we went. It was non-stop art.”

There was a reason for the almost daily dose of art.

“To be a good artist, one must be a careful observer of life,” said Grace, whose brother, Larry Shinoda, is an automotive designer and was largely responsible for the shape and styling of the classic 1963 Corvette Stingray. “My family was always taught to study life--the texture of the rocks, the new blades of grass, the clouds and the shape of the hills.

“I tried to teach my own children the value of life through art. I don’t think we’ve pushed them, but we have exposed them to art.”

Art has long been a focal point in the lives of the elder Nakamuras, who are in their late 50s.

Yoshio, who has several paintings and etchings in the Guggenheim Collection in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., developed his interest while in a Los Angeles hospital. There he was recovering from a combat wound suffered in Europe during World War II while a member of the Army’s famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team made up of Japanese-Americans. A water colorist taught the bedridden veterans how to paint to pass the time and assuage the war’s pain.

He went on to USC and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art before landing his first art teaching job at Whittier High School in the early 1950s.

Grace, who coordinates gifted-student programs for the El Rancho Unified School District, also has a degree in art.

When members of her family, along with thousands of other Japanese-Americans living in Southern California, were shipped to internment camps during the war, they were allowed to take only what they could carry.

Grace took her most valued possession--”my watercolor box.”

The Nakamura children point to Yoshio’s six-month sabbatical in 1970 from Rio Hondo College as a turning point in their art education. Yoshio, who was chairman of the college’s fine arts department at the time, took the family to Europe; they traveled the continent, wandering through dozens of museums and galleries.

“We went to, on the average, three museums a day, studying every period of art,” recalled Joel. “It was like a graduate course in art history. As youngsters, we were already forming opinions about art.”

Even today, the family takes day trips to hike or walk in the local mountains or botanical gardens, hauling along cameras and sketch pads. Such outings, Grace says, often trigger “art attacks” or “art-ritis.”

Despite the exposure to art, only Joel has chosen to make a living at it, although Daniel admits his success has triggered thoughts of leaving teaching and pursuing origami full time.

“I was the youngest, and my parent’s last great hope to get into art as a career,” Joel said. “But if I hadn’t been kicked out of a high school algebra class, it might not have happened.”

Instead of the math class at Whittier’s California High School, Joel was assigned to an art class. “It was then,” Joel said, laughing, “that I got hooked for good.”

This weekend, Yoshio and Grace, both primarily painters and graphic artists, have entered a series of photographs in the Hillcrest festival. Their son-in-law, Jay Oberholtzer, a Whittier attorney and amateur photographer, is also exhibiting several black-and-white prints. Joel and his wife, Karen Payne Nakamura, are showing several paintings, including Joel’s original artwork of the festival’s commemorative poster, a futuristic-looking robot splashed in shiny colors and wielding a dripping paint brush.

And Daniel is displaying several of his folded-paper creations, including an origami gangster, a black machine gun on its shoulder.

With their success, it seems Daniel and Joel should have outgrown the show, which this year attracted more than 200 artists and was expected to draw up to 20,000 people to the festival site--Hillcrest Congregational Church on 2000 West Road in the Puente Hills.

Daniel’s origami, from his quarter-inch miniatures to 18-foot birds, has drawn attention on both sides of the Pacific. His thimble-size crane on a table is on display in Japan’s Paper Museum--the only American work there on permanent display.

Work for Corporate Clients

And Joel, a part-time instructor at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, has done art work for Atari and Epson computers and is working on logos and magazine ads for a new line of Sasson designer jeans.

Yet both are showing at the Hillcrest, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Today’s hours are from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“The festival is a fixture in our community,” said Daniel, one of only a scattering of origami artists displaying work in Southern California. “It’s the most important and visible show for Whittier artists. It’s to Whittier what Laguna Beach’s annual Pageant of the Masters is to Laguna Beach.”

Joel, who works with his wife, also a commercial artist, out of their South Pasadena home, added:

“It’s a show for locals. It was always a show where as kids we could create something, exhibit it and feel accomplished--no matter how bad it was, and some of it was really bad. The show provided younger artists with a lot of support.”