In response to the Kazuo Nakamura: Blue Dimension exhibition, join art historian Ihor Holubizky and artist Louise Noguchi as they look at Nakamura's watercolours from the AGO collection in conversation with Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art.

Kazuo Nakamura(1926-2002) was born in Vancouver to Japanese parents. He his family were detained in internment camps in 1942 under Canada’s War Measures Act during the Second World War. They resettled in Hamilton, Ontario in 1945. Two years later he moved to Toronto, where he would spend the rest of this life. Throughout his four-decades-long career, he explored many different styles and techniques, transitioning between figuration and abstraction. Nakamura was a member of Painters Eleven, a group of Canadian artists associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement. He achieved critical success unprecedented for any Japanese Canadian artist at the time, and has since inspired generations of artists.

About The Speakers

Ihor Holubizky is an art historian and essayist and has held curatorial positions across Canada and in Australia. In 2001, he was the co-curator of the Kazuo Nakamura retrospective for The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, which circulated in Canada through 2003. Holubizky has worked and lectured internationally and contributed to numerous Canadian and international publications on a range of subjects and topics. He received a PhD in art history from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

Louise Noguchi was born in Toronto and graduated from the Ontario College of Art in 1981. She immediately embarked on a very successful career, working primarily in sculpture, photography, and installation. Noguchi attended the University of Windsor in the late 1990s, receiving her MFA in 2000 and was a professor in the Art and Art History Program at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. Her works have been included in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally, most notably in Louise Lawler, Louise Noguchi, Beauty Supply, Toronto (2023);  Contemporary Photographic Art In Canada: The Space of Making, a circulating exhibition co-produced with Neuer Berliner Kuntsverein, Berlin and VOX, Montreal (2005); document (solo exhibition), Dazibao, Montreal (2004); The Language of the Rope, New Gallery, Calgary (2004); and In Light, Art Gallery of Ontario (2002).  Her most recent exhibition, The Shape of Loss was hosted at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and was featured in Toronto's 2025 Nuit Blanche.

Georgiana Uhlyarik is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art in the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario.