Background Artist

Two scenes define Tyrus Wong's remarkable 106-year-old life. In the first scene, a small boy in padded Chinese jacket gazes forlorn behind iron bars, torn from his father and detained indefinitely in a desolate U.S. immigration center off the California coast. In the second scene, the boy is a young man, an aspiring artist in sunny Los Angeles whom Walt Disney suddenly promotes to a key role in the making of beloved animated film Bambi. How did the boy become an artist, and what role did that trauma play in the beautiful imagery he later created for Hollywood? How do the two scenes connect to the seventy years after Bambi, when Tyrus worked as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros., designed best-selling Christmas cards that sold in the millions, and spent a nearly half-century retirement flying his beautifully unique handmade kites on Santa Monica beach?
Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong is a kaleidescopic story about the immigrant origins of some of America's best loved visual imagery. A chronicle of art and Asian American experience set against the backdrop of over a century of American history, Background Artist speaks to lovers of art, film, animation, and illustration history, and readers of biography, Asian American, and California studies.