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Join us for the opening reception for Onna-Bugeisha: Warriors of Light featuring performances by Bekezela Mguni and Legacy Arts Project, with music from Selecta.

About the exhibition:

Onna-Bugeisha: Warriors of Light features the powerful and visually stunning works of Canadian born, Brooklyn-based artist Tim Okamura (b. 1968). By combining an essentially realist approach to the figure with painting and collage Okamura juxtaposes the rawness and urgency of street art with academic principles to create a visual language that acknowledges a traditional form of storytelling through portraiture, while infusing the work with resonant contemporary motifs.

Onna-Bugeisha is a new artistic endeavor in which the artist imagines an alternate reality, a society that closely mirrors our own, which was once liberated and equitable, but is now experiencing a rapid descent into a state of oppression due to the rise in power of an authoritarian regime. Naming themselves the Onna-Bugeisha, the Japanese term for female Samurai, the women in these paintings are a noble tribe of mystical soldiers, champions of virtue, disciples of ancient wisdom, and protectors of morality and the common good.

On view in the August Wilson African American Cultural Center’s Claude Worthington Benedum Gallery and Victoria Gallery from November 9, 2023, through February 18, 2024, this exhibition marks Okamura’s first and largest solo exhibition in the United States presenting this new body of work.