Nonaka-Hill is honored to announce the representation of the estate of Kenzi Shiokava (1938-2021). For over 50 years, Shiokava lovingly transformed found materials into syncretic sculptures that spoke to the heart of transcontinental experience. This is reflected in his multicultural origin story, but also in his intellectual proximity to seminal Los Angeles artists like John Outterbridge, Betye Saar, and Noah Purifoy. Akin to them, Shiokava tacitly addressed his heritage in assemblage, making his works key exemplars of the diasporic condition. The roots of his practice can be found in Brazil, where he was born and raised by Japanese migrant parents; Shiokava would not visit their homeland until much later in life. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 where he lived until his death, becoming a citizen and bringing his American experience to his Japanese-Brazilian heritage. He began his formal art training in the late 1960s as a painter at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), before shifting to sculpture, a medium that unlocked a prism of influence: Indigenous American, African American, Brazilian, Japanese, and American bricolage traditions suddenly informed his use of materials—all of which were procured from the frayed edges of Los Angeles’s infrastructure. This included railroad ties and segments of telephone poles, which over the course of several years Shiokava carved into animistic totems. In manipulating their textures, he exposed the differences between his smoothing hand and that of Southern California’s natural wonders: smog, wind, and sun. One cannot help but reference Noah Purifoy’s monumental series 66 Signs of Neon (1966), forged from the flotsam and jetsam of the 1965 Watts uprising, another class of natural events; but it spoke to the emotional and archeological potential, which Shiokava later embraced, of materials gleaned from the streets.