A Utah museum restored a 1932 painted screen of running horses. It made a ‘one in a million’ find.

When the Utah Museum of Fine Arts acquired a major work by Japanese American artist Chiura Obata, curators knew they were getting something rare.

What they didn’t know, until restoration efforts started, was how much art they were getting.

The discovery was a “one in a million” experience, said Luke Kelly, UMFA’s associate curator of collections, during a presentation last week.

The work is Obata’s 1932 four-panel screen, “Two Running Horses.” The screen was originally part of a 400-work exhibition, “Horses in Art,” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

“He only exhibited once at that exhibition in 1932,” Kelly said. “The next time we see it is in a 1939 photograph.” That photo — taken to accompany a series of lithographs based on watercolors Obata made for UC Berkeley’s magazine, California Monthly — showed Obata in his studio, with the screen in the background.

UMFA hosted an Obata retrospective in 2018, which featured works from throughout his career — including watercolors he painted when he and his family were incarcerated in the Topaz War Relocation Center near Delta, Utah, during World War II. The Obatas were among the estimated 120,000 Americans, either born in Japan or of Japanese ancestry, who were forced by federal order into camps across the western United States.

Working to bring the retrospective to UMFA, Kelly said, prompted the museum to request art from other parts of Obata’s career, outside the works he created at Topaz.

Kimi Hill, Obata’s granddaughter and the family’s historian, said during a talk last Thursday at UMFA that the family wanted to spread the artwork in the collection to different museums and locations, but when it came to art created during the Japanese American incarceration, it was a “no brainer” to go with UMFA.

Ultimately, she said, she helped UMFA acquire 35 different Obata artworks into their collection — including “Two Running Horses.”

When the museum first received the large screen, Kelly said, it had not been on display for 90 years, and “it had a lot of condition issues. … The screen is supposed to be one complete work of art, [but] it was cut, it was basically down the middle. So it could not be exhibited.”

In 2022, the museum received a grant from the Bank of America to help restore the screen. Kelly said these types of screens are usually built with a wooden lattice and layers of paper to build it up with, “the final layer being the work of art itself.”

“Conservation is basically reverse-engineering that,” Kelly said.

During that process, Kelly said the conservator, Yoshi Nishio, started emailing the UMFA’s director of collections that they were finding things that were unusual, like Japanese accounting paper in between the layers. Eventually, Kelly said, they discovered that when Obata was creating the screen, he recycled a lot of his own materials, such as practice sketches.

“The biggest surprise was on the back of the screen, which is usually nothing, but Obata had done a full-scale preparatory drawing of the horses and that he preserved that on the back of the screen,” Kelly said.

“When we discovered all that,” Kelly continued, “we were able to approach the Bank of America again, to get a second conservation grant, to not only make the preparatory drawing its own screen, but also to conserve and to make exhibitable the over 150 drawings that Obata had pasted together to create the layers in his screen.”

Kelly’s account of this story received rapt attention from the people hearing it last week. They were among some 80 Japanese American descendants who were visiting UMFA Friday as part of an annual pilgrimage to Topaz. UMFA was on the itinerary this year because the museum is showcasing an exhibition, “Pictures of Belonging,” that features works by three Japanese American women artists — two of whom were incarcerated at Topaz.

Hill’s talk, an ACME session at the museum, covered her grandmother, Haruko Obata, who was also an artist. Hill said that when she started gathering her family’s history, Haruko was still alive. Hill lived with Haruko as her caregiver for a decade, and collected from her an oral history about both grandparents, their lives, the art they created and their time at Topaz.

Connecting Chiura Obata’s screen back to the “Pictures of Belonging” exhibition — through the link of Obata and his career — works well, Kelly said.

“This idea to reintroduce that whole range of their careers to people that, during their lives, were well known — but after they passed away, that knowledge kind of receded,” he said of the three female artists.

The screen and the exhibition, Kelly said, “bring that full breadth of their careers back to the spotlight, and to put their stories into the bigger, better story of American art and their contribution to it.”