Bruce Yonemoto

Bruce Yonemoto (born 1949) is a Japanese-American multimedia artist. His photographs, installations, sculptures, and films appropriate familiar narrative forms and then circumvent convention through dialogue, music, gestures, and scenes that click in the viewer’s memory without being identifiable. Working in collaboration with his brother, Norman Yonemoto, since 1975, Bruce Yonemoto has set out to divulge a body of work at the crossroads of television, art, commerce, and the museum/gallery world.

Yonemoto received his Bachelor's Degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 before moving to Japan for three years while studying at the Sokei Bijitsu Gakko (Sokei Art Institute) in Tokyo. After returning from Japan in 1975, he went on to receive an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.

Yonemoto has received awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video, and Creative Capital.[1] In 1999 Bruce and his brother Norman were featured in a major mid-career survey show curated by Karen Higa the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.[2]. His installations, photographs and sculptures have been featured in solo shows at the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the St. Louis Art Museum and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; and Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City. His work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the 2002 Corcoran Gallery Bienniel, in Washington D.C.; the 2008 Gwangju Biennial, Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Research Center; and in an expansive survey show in Kanazawa, Japan.

He is currently a Professor of Art at University of California, Irvine.[3]