Robert Katsusuke Ogata is a painter with a sixty-year career as a visual artist. He is an educator, studio artist, and former ceramist. Ogata was born in 1934 and grew up in California’s Central Valley. With his family, he was incarcerated at the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona during World War II. After studying painting with Darwin Musselman and ceramics with Adolph Odorfer at California State University Fresno, he continued post-graduate studies in ceramics with classes, workshops, and residencies with American studio potters John Glick, Warren MacKenzie, Byron Temple, and Peter Voulkos. In the 1970s, Ogata spent six weeks with English potter Michael Cardew at the Big Creek Pottery in California and again in Colorado.
In the 1970s and 80s, Ogata participated in residencies at the Idyllwild School of Music and Art, building an anagama (a traditional Japanese kiln) with the potter Paul Chaleff. He produced and fired his ceramics under the tutelage of Shiro Otani, an intangible cultural asset of Shigaraki, Japan. In 1990, Ogata received a commission from the Japanese American Citizens League to make ceramic plates awarded to select members of the United States Congress who served on the Committee for Redress for Japanese-American citizens who were incarcerated under the War Relocation Authority. Ogata, taught art at Sierra High School, retired in 1997 and began to focus exclusively on studio painting.
Ogata’s work has been represented by Ward Nasse Gallery in New York City, J.J. Brookings Gallery and Chandler Fine Arts in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Gallery, Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena, California, Victoria Boyce in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Galerie Dionisi in Los Angeles. His work has also been exhibited at Art Basel, Miami, the Fresno Art Museum, the Fig Tree Gallery in Fresno, of which he is a founding member, California State University Fresno. It has been included in exhibitions in Regensberg and Munich, Germany; Linz, Austria; Hanamatsu, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan, and included in US and international exhibitions organized by the California Arts Commission. Ogata’s work won a Gold Award from the California Discovery Awards Competition in 1993 and was included in the book 100 Artists of the West Coast (Schiffer, 2003).
In 1997, Ogata helped establish the Downtown Artists Group in Fresno where he maintains a studio and paints full time. The group began ArtHop by opening their studios to the public once a month. This has grown into a city-wide event. He has also collaborated with Piet Ogata and Tim Padilla on the Downtown Artists Gallery to provide exhibition space to local artists. The studio and gallery are open for ArtHop on the first Thursday of each month and by appointment.
