Fumi
Matsumoto

Fumi Matsumoto was born in Japan in 1948 and moved to America in 1952, when she was four years old. She has been influenced by Japanese culture and history throughout her life and her work reflects the Japanese aesthetic — often the Japanese-American experience itself. She is an Alaskan artist, working from Juneau.

Her father, Roy Matsumoto, was held in a Japanese internment camp during World War II — a story documented in the film Honor & Sacrifice: The Roy Matsumoto Story. The weight of that history runs through her work. Her art was featured in the Juneau-Douglas City Museum's 2014 exhibition The Empty Chair: The Forced Removal & Resettlement of Juneau's Japanese Community, 1941–1951, and three of her mixed-media pieces entered the museum's permanent collection through the Rasmuson Foundation Art Acquisition Fund.

Matsumoto's block prints are made from carved linoleum blocks of various sizes — each image often containing several individual blocks layered into a single composition. The papers she prints on are brewed teabag papers, carefully taken apart and glued back together: lighter sheets from green or herbal teas, darker from black teas like Earl Grey. Friends and collectors save teabags for her. The technique is patient, conservation-minded, and unmistakably hers.

Her subjects are Alaskan wildlife — most often the Corvids: ravens, jays, magpies, crows. "The intelligence of birds, particularly Corvids, is impressive," she has said. "Watching the ravens loitering in the downtown parking lots waiting for handouts and morsels of discarded food reveals their resourceful and adaptable nature." Matsumoto exhibited in Roby King Gallery's Black & White exhibition in 2021 — the legacy program JG Art Gallery now continues.