Distinctly Montana Magazine

THE LIFE, ART AND PHILANTHROPY OF HARRY KOYAMA BY VIRGINIA A. BRYAN For as long as he can remember, Harry Koyama has considered himself an “artist-in-waiting.” On a Bozeman gallery walk in 2003, Harry had an epiphany. Something he saw sparked a long dormant passion for painting, discovered in college but never pursued. As he puts it, “My passion for art was re-ignited.” He went home, got out his easel, and hasn’t quit painting since. “I pinch myself every day,” Harry said. “I never thought I’d put spaghetti on the table doing what I love!” A man with a gentle countenance, an easy laugh, and a contented spirit, Harry’s colorful grizzlies, elk, moose, American Indian dancers, and landscapes are in fine galleries and collections throughout the west. In 2011, he was invited to the juried Western Masters Art Show and Sale. I first met Harry early in his full time artist’s life in a quaint lobby-studio of the old Hotel Becker on Hardin’s Main Street. Harry grew up in Hardin and got a degree in art from Montana State University-Billings. After college, Harry farmed the family sugar beet operation with two brothers near Hardin and did commissioned metal sculp- ture in the winter months. “Art,” said Harry Koyama “was never far away.” POWER OF FORGIVENESS Ben Steele, a Professor Emeritus of Art at Montana State University-Billings, remembers the day young Harry Koyama walked into his art class at MSU-Billings in the mid-1960s. Steele, a WWII Bataan Death March survivor, thought he saw a “ghost” when Harry appeared. When he began working with the talented young man of Japanese descent, one of the “best in the class,” Steele said his ani- mosities just “melted away.” Harry didn’t know of his role in his professor’s life journey until he read the recent best-seller about Steele and other Bataan survivors by Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman, Tears of Darkness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). 46 DISTINCTLY MONTANA • SUMMER 2011 Passion Re-Ignited:

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