Painter and muralist Sachio Yamashita (1933-2009) was born in Kagoshima, Japan. As a child during World War II, he developed an early interest in drawing and later trained as an artist in Tokyo. He worked as a cartoonist for local newspapers and magazines until 1968, when he traveled to the United States to teach spatial design at an art school outside of Chicago. In Chicago, he became active with local arts organizations and government agencies as a community muralist. Committed to altering the urban environment through large-scale public art, he executed nearly two dozen murals in various parts of the city through both public and private commissions and guerilla art tactics. Identifying as an “environmental artist,” his aim was to bring a new sense of spatiality to public spaces using bold shapes, vibrant colors, and eye-catching images. One project in particular involved painting Chicago’s iconic rooftop water towers different colors, while another consisted of a large swath of a city wall along an underpass. Yamashita’s most memorable murals, however, were a replica of the nineteenth century woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Ukiyo-e artist Hokusai along the entire length of a three-story corner building, and a large super-graphics mural on lower Wacker Drive. This mural, titled Balance of Power, was featured in the final chase scene of the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Yamashita is credited with developing the Midwest supergraphics approach to muralism in the early 1970s.
Receiving significant press coverage for his murals and community-based projects, Yamashita became in-demand as a Midwestern Muralist. Between 1968 and 1982 he completed more than 100 public murals in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois. Relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1980s, he painted regularly, creating a large body of work that built on his ideas in public art. Although he continued to create murals in California, his output of public art decreased significantly and he instead chose to focus on canvas painting and drawing. Delving into colorist experiments, he explored the visual sensation of muted hues in colorist paintings that seem to radiate light or focused on a single swath of color in paintings of various sizes that invoke his early muralist days.
Yamashita’s work is housed in private and public collections throughout the West Coast and the Midwest including the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Oakland Museum of California, and the Sacramento Convention Center. A recent renewed interest in his work led to a 2018 segment on Chicago’s PBS affiliate titled “What Became of Artist Behind These 1970s Murals.”