Salmon for R.B.

A color mezzotint dedicated to Rick Bartow, the American artist of Wiyot descent who died in 2016 after a long collaboration with Hiroshima. Bartow worked frequently with the salmon as a subject drawn from Pacific Northwest indigenous tradition, and Hiroshima pulled most of his editioned mezzotints at his Tokyo press. The 2019 dedication, three years after Bartow's death, places this print as a memorial within Hiroshima's own production. Color mezzotint requires either multiple plates registered in sequence or à la poupée inking, in which different colors are applied to a single plate by hand before each impression — a slow process that suits a small, deliberate edition. Beyond the biographical reference, the salmon also functions in Japanese culture as a marker of seasonal return and northern fisheries; Hiroshima's treatment likely combines the warm tonal range associated with Bartow's palette with his own quieter, graduated approach to the mezzotint surface.