Jimi Suzuki (1933-2022) was born James Hiroshi Suzuki in Yokohama, Japan. He first received private art lessons under the instruction of Yoshio Markino, who had come to America in the late 19th century, and who then lived decades in London, before returning to Japan at the start of WWII. Markino encouraged Suzuki to travel to America. He arrived on the West Coast and visited Los Angeles and San Francisco, before heading to Maine. He was eager to isolate himself from his Japanese peers, wanting to live and experience America on his own. He studied at the Portland School of Fine Arts in Maine, and in 1953 won a scholarship to the Corcoran School of Art, in Washington D.C.

He then moved to New York City and in 1958 won a Whitney Opportunity Fellowship. That same year, he participated in an important exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, called "Contemporary Painters of Japanese Origin in America-1958," and exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. By this time Suzuki had become friends with the Abstract Expressionist painters making waves in the art world—artists such as Kenzo Okada, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Shoichi Hasegawa, and Jackson Pollock. His friend and colleague, Peter Voulkos—the pioneering sculptor of avant-garde ceramics—called Jimi “a modern Rosanjin,” referring to Kitaoji Rosanjin (1883-1959), a potter famous for his stylist breadth and uninhibited spirit.

He exhibited at important galleries in New York including the Duveen-Graham Gallery, where he showed until 1961, and participated in several traveling museum shows. Later in his career he exhibited internationally as well. Moving back to California in the early 1960's, Suzuki began a teaching career at University of California, Berkeley, with David Hockney, and then at the California College of Arts and Crafts from 1965-1966. He later taught at the University of Kentucky and UC Davis.

In 1972, Suzuki began to teach at California State University in Sacramento, before retiring and moving back to Japan. Some of his early abstracts are lyrical, reflecting the traditional Japanese art. Others seem more Abstract Expressionist, done with rapidly brushed calligraphic strokes. He has worked in all media, with a special fondness for assemblage and collage, made under the influence of Dada and Surrealism. He is socially and politically conscious, and this is reflected in some of his later collage works.