Sachio Yamashita Sold at Auction Prices

Sachio Yamashita (1933-2009) was a Japanese-American artist primarily known as the creator of more than 100 public murals throughout the Midwest between 1968 and 1982, and later as an abstract painter and muralist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Yamashita identified as an environmental muralist who showed, according to Chicago art historian Rebecca Zorach, how murals could be understood not just as community-based art but as huge environmental installations, breaking free from the gallery, changing city dweller's consciousness.

Yamashita created at least 20 murals in Chicago alone. The most notable covered a building used by Art and Soul, an experimental art collaboration between a local street gang, the Conservative Vice Lords, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Yamashita achieved extraordinary visibility for his murals. In 1976 he appeared in Time Magazine boasting that he was going to paint every water tower in the city of Chicago.

In San Francisco, Yamashitaâ??s work was exhibited at Triangle Gallery and the deYoung Museum.