Sculptor transformed discarded wood into totems
LOS ANGELES — Kenzi Shiokava, who died June 18 at the age of 82 from chronic conditions exacerbated by injuries related to a recent car accident, became a sculptor more by chance than intention. It was the early 1970s, and he was completing his fourth year of undergraduate studies at the Chouinard Art Institute.
When he’d enrolled at the school, Mr. Shiokava had set his sights on becoming a painter. But a graduation requirement obligated him to complete a course in sculpture. The very idea filled him with doubt. “Two weeks went by and I didn’t have a single idea of what to do,” Mr. Shiokava told the Los Angeles Times in a 2016 profile.
He ended up finding the answer in his own backyard. One day, as he tidied up the garden of his Highland Park home, he came across several pieces of wood he had accumulated, including an old railroad tie from the Angel’s Flight funicular in downtown Los Angeles.
“I started cleaning some of the wood and I realize: ‘That’s it! It’s wood!’” recalled Mr. Shiokava. “It has a history. It’s right there. I was so excited — nothing else mattered.”
He transformed the tie, along with the other pieces of wood he had gathered, into a series of vertical, totemic figures that he displayed in Chouinard’s gallery in 1972. The exhibition drew the attention of LA gallerist Joan Ankrum who gave the artist a solo show.
After that, Mr. Shiokava never looked back. In fact, it was work in the style of those early wooden totems, carefully sculpted from dead tree trunks and reclaimed telephone poles — pieces that felt more like spirits than objects — which drew the attention of a pair of curators affiliated with the Hammer Museum more than four decades later. Those curators, Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, ended up including a large selection of Mr. Shiokava’s work in the 2016 “Made in L.A.” biennial.
A collection of abstracted wooden totems — looking like spirits — rest on a broad, shallow museum plinth.
At 78 years of age, Mr. Shiokava became a breakout star of the show — profiled in international media and name checked in W magazine. It was an unlikely turn for the artist, who throughout his life had operated at the margins of the Los Angeles art world. And who had made his living not as an artist, but as a gardener. Among his clients was actor Marlon Brando, who counted one of Mr. Shiokava’s pieces in his personal art collection.
Mr. Shiokava, whose death was first announced on social media by the Japanese American National Museum and was confirmed to the LA Times by his niece Xantipa Reed, was a radiant, personable figure, far more preoccupied with the process of creation than in glad-handing in the gallery circuit. One of his favorite activities? Attending the live jazz performances at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and dancing with wild abandon.
“He was the kind of person who, up until his death, all he wanted to do was to be in his studio,” said Mr. Moshayedi, currently the Robert Soros curator at the Hammer. “The time he spent in the studio, it was a completely different temporality. Works would hang out there in various states of incompletion for decades ... and new objects would enter the studio and they may or may not become parts of works that were sitting in various states of dormancy.”
Even after the Hammer exhibition began to draw the attention of the media and museums and galleries, Mr. Shiokava remained committed to his vision. “He had willfully decided after that attention to remain working in the way that he had established for himself,” said Mr. Moshayedi. “He was not going to get caught up in the speed and intensity of the contemporary art world.”