Marc Selwyn Fine Art is honored to present Ben Sakoguchi: Chin Music, the gallery’s first exhibition with the Pasadena-based artist. Opening November 8 and continuing through December 23, 2025, the show features over fifty of Sakoguchi’s iconic Orange Crate Label paintings along with Mexican Americans, 2008, a twelve-panel grid from his Unauthorized History of Baseball series, and three works from his Postcards from Camp series. Ben Sakoguchi: Chin Music precedes his first major traveling survey exhibition, organized by The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, opening in 2027.
The exhibition’s title, Chin Music, references a baseball term describing a high, inside pitch meant to startle the batter—a “brushback” that demands attention. Originally, “chin music” entered American slang to describe idle talk or chatter, a double meaning that resonates deeply with Sakoguchi’s practice. His paintings, rendered with the crisp precision of commercial design, both entertain and unsettle, their vivid compositions filled with history, politics, and culture. Like the jarring pitch, Sakoguchi’s work comes close enough to provoke a reaction—using wit, irony, and color to confront the moral evasions that shape American life. The expression’s literary legacy reaches back to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895)—“There’s too much chin music an’ too little fightin’ in this war, anyhow”—a sentiment that could equally apply to the social complacency his paintings critique.
For nearly five decades, Sakoguchi has chronicled the contradictions and complexities of American life through meticulously painted vignettes that merge history, advertising, and satire. His Orange Crate Label paintings, inspired by the bright fruit-box labels he encountered in his family’s San Bernardino grocery store, transform the aesthetics of California’s agricultural branding into a vehicle for storytelling. Each small canvas—anchored by a fictional brand name, the ever-present orange, and a real location in his home state—functions as both cultural artifact and commentary, weaving together headlines, heroes, and injustices with humor and precision. The result is a visual archive of postwar America filtered through the artist’s sharp wit and moral clarity.
Many of Sakoguchi’s works are overtly political. In MAGA SCOTUS Brand, 2022, for example, from Courtland, California, The Supreme Court of the United States becomes The Supreme Court of Trump’s US. Other Orange Crate Label paintings play with cultural moments mining art historical themes. In Aces + Artists Brand, from Birds Landing, California, World War I flying ace Charles Nungesser appears alongside Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego introduced in 1921. Nungesser vanished in 1927 while attempting a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York. His disappearance resonates with later artistic gestures that embrace risk and the unknown, such as Bas Jan Ader’s fatal ocean crossing in pursuit of the sublime. By pairing Nungesser with Sélavy, Sakoguchi highlights how audacity, whether expressed through daring feats of aviation or avant-garde experimentation, remains worthy of admiration regardless of outcome.
Also on display are works from the artist’s Words series which follow the same format but are characterized by a bold “brand name” streaking across the canvas. “Brands” are dominated by words that evoke headline buzzwords and viral hash tags as in Deplorables Brand, 2017, Pizzagate Brand, 2017, and Nasty Woman Brand, 2016.
Begun in the late 1990s following the deaths of his parents, Sakoguchi’s Postcards from Camp series reflects on the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, including Sakoguchi’s own childhood confinement under Executive Order 9066. Drawing on family photographs, government documentation, and contemporaneous press imagery, the series reconstructs daily life inside the camps with a mix of documentary precision and elegiac clarity. Rather than picturing internment as an abstract injustice, Sakoguchi presents it through the textures of lived experience—small gestures, remembered fragments, and the everyday resilience demanded by displacement. Ultimately, the series positions personal testimony as an act of historical correction, resisting the erasures that have long softened the narrative of America at war.
The exhibition’s inclusion of Mexican Americans, 2008, a multi-canvas baseball-themed work, expands his focus from personal history to cultural recognition, foregrounding Latino players whose contributions to the game have been undervalued or overshadowed in its official storytelling. The work reflects the artist’s broader engagement with who is visible in American iconography—and who is left out.
Ben Sakoguchi received his BA and MFA from UCLA in 1960 and 1964 and taught at Pasadena City College from 1964 to 1997. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Cantor Art Center, Stanford; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Perez Art Museum, Miami, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
