Teikichi Hikoyama

Teikichi Hikoyama came to San Francisco from Japan in 1901. Little is known about his three-decade stay in the Bay Area, where he made a meager living giving private art lessons. He lived with the family of a publisher in San Francisco’s Japantown in the 1910s and 1920s, and used a printing press he kept in a studio in the family’s basement to create what may have been the first woodblock prints produced in California by a Japanese American artist.