WILMINGTON — For more than four decades, Hiroshi Sueyoshi’s presence has helped shape the Wilmington art community, where he served as a friend and mentor to countless artists since moving to the area in the late 1970s.
The ceramic artist and teacher passed away on Friday, March 7, at 78 following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease.
“My first impressions of Hiroshi were just of his gentle, caring spirit,” friend Heather Wilson, executive director of Cameron Art Museum, said in a phone interview with Port City Daily.
CAM owns 14 of Sueyoshi’s works, from large-scale sculptures, like “Harmony,” to smaller ceramic pieces, such as the 17.25 inch tall “Torso Vase.” The museum will close Sunday, March 16, to host Sueyoshi’s celebration of life, open to the public; the service begins at 2 p.m., with doors opening at 1 p.m.
“When I think of Hiroshi, ‘generous’ is the first word that comes to mind,” friend and fellow artist Elizabeth Darrow said. “Even when he was quite debilitated by Parkinson’s, he would always offer me some token gift when I visited him. A box of incense, and pine cone wrapped in wire, some little trinket as a way of expressing his gratitude for my visit. He was always giving back.”
Darrow and Sueyoshi met in 1982 when he was moving out of his downtown studio on Castle Street and Darrow was moving in. The two would both show their work at Deacon Galleries, one of downtown Wilmington’s first in the early 1980s.
Sueyoshi moved to Wilmington in 1978 after being selected as a visiting artist to work and teach at Cape Fear Technical Institute, now Cape Fear Community College. His original classroom was a small studio on the second floor of a three-story barge floating on the Cape Fear River.
“The students were largely on their own with concept and execution,” former CAM executive director Anne Brennan said, noting his constant encouragement.
Brennan met Sueyoshi long before the Cameron Art Museum had been built, when he was first starting to teach at the Hannah Block USO / Community Arts Center. Brennan worked across the street at the former St. John’s Art Museum, which would eventually become CAM.
“So many teachers want you to do it their way,” Nicholas Wilson, Sueyoshi’s former student, said. “He didn’t care if you did it his way — he wanted you to do it your way, unless he saw that you weren’t going to be able to succeed.”
When CAM was built, Sueyoshi became the first artist in residence for the Pancoe Art Education Center at Cameron Art Museum, where he taught both day and night classes for roughly a decade.
A master craftsman, Sueyoshi spent decades teaching pottery to students of all ages between classes at Cape Fear Community College, CAM’s Pancoe Art Education Center and the Community Arts Center while crafting his own work.
“He could move one finger an eighth-of-an-inch and the entire vase would take a different shape,” Nicholas Wilson said. “He was a master.”
His work often utilized local clay he dug up from Blue Clay Road in Castle Hayne.
Born Nov. 5, 1946 in Ishikawa, Japan, and raised in Tokyo, Sueyoshi loved art from a young age. As a child, he and his older brother competed in building model airplanes by hand, inspiring Sueyoshi to later study aeronautical engineering. After four years and waning interest, he decided to pursue industrial engineering at a design school. Still, Sueyoshi was unsatisfied.
“Industrial engineering doesn’t quite express your opinion or your feeling,” he said in a short documentary posted by Cameron Art Museum in 2020.
In 1968, Sueyoshi and three friends visited Mishiko, a pottery town several hours north of Tokyo. There, he landed an apprenticeship where he learned the ways of ceramics through wheel-throwing, hand-building and glaze-mixing.
In Mishiko, Sueyoshi befriended Charlotte and Jerry Fenberg, an American couple from Tennessee. They ask him to come to North Carolina to help design and build a Japanese kiln and studio. In 1971, Sueyoshi moved to Asheboro with the intention of returning to Japan.
“I was going to stay five years, but I’m still here,” Sueyoshi said in the documentary.
Two decades later, in 2006, Sueyoshi received the North Carolina Living Treasure Award from UNCW in recognition of his excellence of craft.
“He was always experimenting,” Nicholas Wilson said. “There was never a limit to what he would do.”
Despite specializing in pottery, Sueyoshi would often adventure outside of ceramics. One of his most famous pieces, “Harmony” is an abstract 17-foot poly-chromed steel sculpture that depicts a man, woman and child. Originally built in 2000 for The Forum, it was relocated to CAM in 2020.
“He was a great, great example of how you should be. If you have a lot of skills, it’s about who you are as an artist, not about what tricks you know,” friend and local paper artist Fritzi Huber said. “His personal expression outweighed what he accomplished with materials.”
Huber and Sueyoshi met in 1988 at the New Elements Gallery shortly after she moved to the area from California. The two partnered in art shows and traded work often; Huber recalls during one exhibition, he kept grapes on him.
“He kept playing with something in his pocket,” Huber said and when she asked what it was, Sueyoshi responded: “‘In situations like this, I need a little something.’”
CAM hosted his retrospective exhibition, “Matter Of Reverence,” in November of 2014 and even though Sueyoshi was diagnosed at least decade ago with Parkinson’s, he continued to focus on art.
“He kept on creating these amazing things until he died,” Brennan said, adding Sueyoshi would use leaves from his backyard to create arrangements when he was no longer physically capable of throwing clay, due to Parkinson’s.
“There is a bit of Hiroshi’s spirit in every piece of work that he has made,” CAM director Heather Wilson said.
Sueyoshi is survived by his wife, Jane; his son, Tadashi Sueyoshi; sister, Yoshie Sueyoshi; and brother, Tosaburo Sueyoshi.
In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Cameron Art Museum, Michael J. Fox Foundation and Lower Cape Fear Hospice.
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