Untitled
2018
John Yoyogi Fortes
Sacramento, California
Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.
About John Yoyogi Fortes
Born in a taxi on Yoyogi Street in Tokyo, Japan, John Yoyogi Fortes is a Filipino-American painter based in Sacramento. His paintings are often large scale explorations of self that lean towards a whimsical, dark, and obscure world. Fortes’s artwork has been exhibited throughout the US, Venezuela, Japan, the Philippines, and Norway. His paintings are held in numerous private collections as well as in the collections of the Asian American Art Centre in New York, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Triton Museum of Art in California, and the Crocker Art Museum, also in California. His work was included in the International Arts & Artists traveling exhibition, Infinite Mirror: Images of American Identity, which opened at Syracuse University in New York in 2011 and traveled to museums and universities throughout the Eastern United States. Fortes has received grants from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission and a Visual Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. In 2004, John was awarded a prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. In 2018, John was a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE.
Program Participation
Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2019
Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2004
Website / Social Links
Ever since I decided to pursue art as a career, I’ve always been curious about who I was as an artist and my connection to the work. It wasn’t until I began painting about my father’s struggle with Alzheimer's and using my Filipino background as a source to inform my art that I realized I was on this mysterious journey of self discovery.”
