James Hiroshi Suzuki completed the triptych, Where Are We Going? in 1957, when he was 24. With its bright, shimmering upper register and horizontal orientation, Where Are We Going? evokes a history of landscape painting and suggests an interest in the colors and shapes found in nature. The rich blues, soft brushwork, and triptych format of Where Are We Going? recall Alma Thomas’s Morning in the Bowl of Night, also on view in the gallery.
The year after making Where Are We Going? Suzuki participated in four museum exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He also had a solo exhibition at Barnett Aden, the Washington, D.C., gallery that Alma Thomas helped found.
Suzuki studied art with Yoshio Makino (romanized as Markino) in Japan before moving in 1952 to the U.S. He continued his education at the Portland School of Fine Arts in Maine and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington. A lifelong teacher, he retired from Sacramento State University in 1999.