The Paintings of Ben Sakoguchi
June 30, 2016 1:27 PM   Subscribe

In a series of colorful, captivating, and often provocative paintings, Los Angeles artist Ben Sakoguchi (b. 1938) examines how baseball, long referred to as America’s national pastime, reflects both the highs and lows of American culture. The son of a grocer and avid baseball fan, Sakoguchi juxtaposes the iconic imagery of vintage orange crate labels from the 1920s to the 1950s with whimsical, eccentric, and sometimes scathing portrayals of America’s beloved sport. posted by dfm500 (8 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Those are great. The first one I saw in the gallery of the first link was Nam Ball Brand, which really did a number on my mind. Talk about worlds colliding.
posted by languagehat at 2:04 PM on June 30, 2016


These are bizarrely fascinating. I didn't quite get them at first (I'm not very up on the minutiae of either baseball or American history, and my art literacy is rusty) but I can't stop looking at them and the more I look the more I see.

The first link says this: Through this expansive collection, The Unauthorized History of Baseball in 100-Odd Paintings: The Art of Ben Sakoguchi presents a “people’s history” of baseball, telling true stories of players and communities that have been overlooked, forgotten, or misrepresented.

I'm particularly interested in these three: Issei Ball, Go for Broke, MIS'ers (i.e. the Military Intelligence Service of WWII-era Japanese American linguists). I love to see art by Japanese Americans about Japanese American history, because it gets past "internment was bad" (yes, yes it was) and into all the little nooks and crannies of the Japanese American experience. I don't see a lot that I recognize in the other baseball paintings, but if they are anything like these, the artist has done something really kind of radical in connecting the histories - the real, detailed histories - of all these so-called minority groups through baseball. And man, he is prolific.

The Brief History of Slavery ones - wow, some of them are intensely uncomfortable, but they are so brutally on point. La Vie en Rose.
posted by sunset in snow country at 2:19 PM on June 30, 2016


Damn it, noticed my link error just as the edit window ran out. Go For Broke.
posted by sunset in snow country at 2:25 PM on June 30, 2016


I've seen his paintings on display at Pasadena City College where he taught for many years. The orange crate labels are the same size as actual orange crate labels and delightful.
posted by blob at 2:45 PM on June 30, 2016


Don't miss his website
posted by blob at 2:47 PM on June 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


The link at www.sakoguchi.info includes the descriptive text from the Skirball exhibition.
posted by drlith at 2:51 PM on June 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


Oh HELL yes! Thank you for the tip, drlith. I went to look at the text for the paintings I highlighted, and found out that one of the men in the Issei Ball painting is Chiura Obata, whose artwork is absolutely stunning.
posted by sunset in snow country at 3:00 PM on June 30, 2016


Oh wow. The detailed explanations in drlith's link of the imagery and subjects in each baseball painting are exactly what I wanted when I started looking at these. The Segregation/Desegregation page is particularly fascinating. Thanks for this cool post, dfm500, and to drlith for the direct pointer to the explanations.
posted by mediareport at 3:08 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


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