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 major support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by the Billy Rose Foundation, the AD&A Museum Council, and the Margaret Mallory Trust.