Born in 1932 in Waipahu, O‘ahu. After World War II, Harry Tsuchidana studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, and was heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement of the time. In New York, he received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1959, and while there, he befriended other Japanese-American artists from Hawaii who preceded him. Among them were Satoru Abe and Tadashi Sato, both members of the Hawaii artists’ group, Metcalf Chateau, and they would become lifelong friends. Tsuchidana and the Metcalf Chateau artists was featured in the Honolulu Museum of Art’s groundbreaking exhibition Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West. Tsuchidana’s works are a part of the Art in Public Places Collection of the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and have been exhibited at Hawaii State Art Museum. He was also featured in the Chanel Waikiki Gallery in 2009, and in 2016, the Honolulu Museum of Art presented a large solo retrospective of his work in its gallery at First Hawaiian Center. A popular local artist with a playful personality, Tsuchidana was interviewed last year on PBS Hawaii’s Long Story Short. “Tsuchidana’s Stage series of minimal abstractions explores his system for dividing the pictorial space into linear, geometric compositions,” said the late Jay Jensen, who was curator of contemporary art at the Honolulu Museum of Art. “It is in the many variations on this theme that his talent as a master of color is richly evident.” At the age of 85, Tsuchidana continues to work in his studio every day.