Ben Sakoguchi: Only in America

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, together with the Japanese American National Museum, is co-organizing, Ben Sakoguchi: Only in America, the first major traveling survey exhibition of Pasadena-based artist Ben Sakoguchi (b. United States, 1938). From his earliest print work and psychedelic paintings of the 1960s, to his long-standing Orange Crate Labels series, Sakoguchi’s work examines themes ranging from consumer culture, race, religion, politics, war, and memory in the United States. This exhibition is a comprehensive survey of work from the 1960s to the present day showing the full breadth of Sakoguchi’s oeuvre. The exhibition is scheduled to be on view in Santa Barbara January through April 2027, and will then travel to JANM in Los Angeles, October 2027 through April 2028.

Throughout his sixty-year career, Ben Sakoguchi has chronicled the contradictions and complexities of American life through meticulously painted vignettes that merge history, advertising, social commentary, and satire. Sakoguchi’s tableaus depict “America the beautiful,” haunted by harsh subtexts of racism, exploitation, state-sanctioned violence, and xenophobia. By turns comical and brutal, his work is an archive of micro-histories and broader historical narratives from the perspective of a self-described “outsider.” The artist’s experience as a Japanese American incarcerated at the Poston concentration camp between 1942–45 imbues his storybook scenes of daily life with a biting cynicism that dispels and interrogates the myth of American exceptionalism.

Ben Sakoguchi: Only in America brings together more than 100 artworks including prints, individual and multi-panel paintings, sculptural installation, and 3D diorama that showcase the extraordinary breadth of the artist’s sixty-year career. Accompanying the exhibition, the AD&A Museum will publish the first scholarly monograph dedicated to Sakoguchi’s oeuvre with Hirmer Publishers. Contributors to the exhibition catalog include Diane C. Fujino (UCSB), Ana Iwataki (JANM), Michael Lobel (Hunter College), Gabriel Ritter (UCSB), and an artist response by poet Brandon Shimoda.

Ben Sakoguchi: Only in America is co-organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Japanese American National Museum and is curated by Gabriel Ritter, Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at UCSB and Director of the AD&A Museum. The exhibition and catalog are made possible thanks to the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Billy Rose Foundation, the AD&A Museum Council, and the Margaret Mallory Trust.

About the Japanese American National Museum (JANM)

Established in 1985, JANM promotes understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by sharing the Japanese American experience. Located in the historic Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles, JANM is a center for civil rights, ensuring that the hard-fought lessons of the World War II incarceration are not forgotten. A Smithsonian Affiliate, one of America’s Cultural Treasures, and an International Site of Conscience, JANM is a hybrid institution that straddles traditional museum categories. JANM is a center for the arts as well as history. It provides a voice for Japanese Americans and a forum that enables all people to explore their own heritage and culture. Since opening to the public in 1992, JANM has presented over one hundred exhibitions onsite while traveling forty exhibits to venues such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Ellis Island Museum in the United States, and to several leading cultural museums in Japan and South America. Through its programs and Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, it serves as a beacon for civil rights. In January 2027, JANM will reopen following a two-year renovation to its Pavilion, transformed by powerful storytelling, immersive installations, and new technology that connect the stories of the Japanese American community to the urgent issues facing all of us today.

About the Artist

Ben Sakoguchi (b. 1938, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Pasadena. He received his BFA and MFA from UCLA and taught at the Art Department at Pasadena City College until his retirement in 1997. He has exhibited solo projects at Gasworks, London (2025); Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Beverly Hills (2025); Standard (Oslo), Oslo (2024); Ortuzar Projects, New York (2023/2020); Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris (2023); Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024/2021); POTTS, Alhambra (2018); The Skirball Center, Los Angeles (2016); The Alternative Museum, New York (1992); and San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco (1980). His work has been featured in institutional surveys and group exhibitions including Get in the Game, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024); Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); No Prior Art: Illustrations of Inventions, PST ART, Library Foundation of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Public Library (2024); ¡Pleibol! In the Barrios and the Big Leagues, California Museum, Sacramento (2024); footnotes and headlines, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2021); Landscape, Derosia, New York (2021); L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena (2012); Sub-Pop, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011); Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2000); and The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum, New York (1990). He was twice awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles; the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford; the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; the AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., are among the public collections holding work by Ben Sakoguchi.