Wes Senzaki
(part 2 of 4)

from East Wind Magazine Vol. 1 No. 1 (1982)

I really started to make a serious effort in that direction after I moved to San Francisco in 1974. I became involved with the Committee Against Nihonmachi Eviction (CANE) and joined their newsletter committee. I started doing illustrations. From that it progressed and grew. I started doing things for the October First Celebrations, for normalization of relations between the U.S. and China. That's when I was introduced to the Kearny Street Workshop which was flourishing.

I felt there was a real need on the cultural level to develop skills and promote a Japanese American community art. A couple of us on CANE's newsletter committee frequently talked about art. We used to talk with others too about the need for some place, a facility we could work out of. A place where we could develop politically conscious art and offer art classes that people normally could not afford. They wouldn't get the same perspective going just to an art school like the Academy of Art in San Francisco. We wanted more of a grassroots thing basically. So the idea of having an arts workshop in the community came about, and we were able to get some seed money from the Japantown Art Movement, a coalition of community groups that was formed to get funding for community art programs. We got use of the empty space at 1852 Sutter from the Redevelopment Agency. There were people interested at that time, most of whom are still involved: Doug Yamamoto, Rich Wada, Mitsu Yashima, Gail Aratani and others. So we began in early'76 to rehabilitate the building. By early 1977, around springtime, it was starting to take shape. We put the word out about this art workshop in the community. We had a formal organizing committee and started dealing with what we were going to call ourselves and where we were coming from. We opened on October 1, 1977. That's how the Japantown Art and Media (JAM) Workshop came into being.

Senzaki 3 (Getting Started)