Fumi Matsumoto

Fumi Matsumoto was born in Japan in 1948 and came to the United States at the age of four, settling in Berkeley, California. She moved to Fairbanks, Alaska in 1980 and has lived in Juneau since 1990. The Alaskan landscape — and in particular its birds — has been the primary subject of her work for more than three decades.

Her father, Roy Matsumoto, was a Japanese-American soldier who survived the internment camps of World War II and went on to become a highly decorated war hero. That history runs directly through her work: the Japanese-American experience is both subject and formal concern, inflected through traditional Japanese techniques she has practiced for decades — hanga (block printing), sumi-e (ink brush painting), kirigami, origami, and raku ceramics.

Her most distinctive medium is the linocut print on repurposed teabag paper. She brews, disassembles, and reassembles used teabags — lighter sheets from green or herbal teas, darker sheets from black tea — each with a warmth and texture no manufactured paper replicates. Friends and collectors save teabags for her. The prints are carved from linoleum blocks and typically feature corvids: ravens, jays, magpies, crows. Their intelligence and adaptability in difficult environments are, for Matsumoto, a form of argument.

Three works are in the permanent collection of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, acquired through the Rasmuson Foundation Alaska Art Fund: Issei/Nisei (2007), Gaman (2011) — “endure” — and Ibara no Michi (2012), “Pathway of Thorns.” Her work was featured in the museum’s 2014 summer exhibition on the forced removal and resettlement of Juneau’s Japanese community during World War II. She has spent more than thirty years both creating and teaching art.