Kazuo Nakamura

1926 - 2002

Born in Vancouver in 1926 to Japanese parents, Kazuo Nakamura was interned with his family in a camp in British Columbia during the Second World War. He moved to Ontario in 1945, studying commercial art in Hamilton and later in Toronto. Nakamura was a co-founder, in 1953, of the Painters Eleven collective, a grouping of artists that became “crucial to the development of the Toronto artistic scene and eventually to all of Canadian art,” as Denise Leclerc describes in her foreword to Iris Nowell’s Painters Eleven. Nakamura was the “quiet one” of the group, and his production reflects this aspect of his personality.