The Walt Disney Family Museum is presenting the exhibition Water to Paper, Paint to Sky: The Art of Tyrus Wong. The exhibition focuses on the life and work of Chinese-American artist Tyrus Wong—a celebrated painter, muralist, kite maker, lithographer, Hollywood sketch artist, calligrapher, ceramicist, and Disney Legend. At age 102, Wong is still a practicing artist today.

Despite graduating in the midst of the Depression, Wong led an active life as an artist. He exhibited work throughout the country, including a 1932 group exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute that featured Pablo Picasso. Wong and other young Asian artists including Hideo Date and Benji Okubo gained recognition by exhibiting as the “Orientalists.”

Like many other young, struggling artists of the 1930s, Wong was hired under the Federal Arts Project, a branch of the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration (WPA).