One of the indelible images in “Pictures of Belonging,” an exhibition of work by three female artists whose careers were impeded — but not snuffed out — by the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, is Miné Okubo’s “Wind and Dust” from 1943. In it, a family shield their faces, and each other, from a sandstorm, huddled in a tight mass of interlocking bodies. Behind them, the desert is punctuated by barracks, a landscape of depressing sameness. You get the sense that these vulnerable figures are being battered not just by the weather, but by the world itself.
The watercolor was made at Topaz, in Utah, one the camps that Okubo was transferred to during the war. (They were referred to at the time by government officials as “concentration camps” or the more euphemistic “internment camps”; more recently, some historians have used the term “incarceration camps.”)
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, on the heels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from coastal areas, ostensibly for reasons of national security. They were forced to abandon their homes and possessions or sell them for a pittance, and to relocate to makeshift facilities in harsh conditions. About two-thirds of them were, like Okubo, American citizens.
“Pictures of Belonging,” organized by the curator and scholar ShiPu Wang in conjunction with the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., brings almost 100 works by Okubo, Hisako Hibi and Miki Hayakawa back into the frame of American art. Back into the frame, because these three women — Okubo, a second-generation Japanese American, and Hibi and Hayakawa, first-generation immigrants — were all acclaimed artists in a remarkably multicultural San Francisco art world before the war. Hibi and Okubo were incarcerated; Hayakawa’s parents were, too, but Hayakawa relocated to New Mexico to avoid that fate.
Hayakawa became well known for her sensitive portraits, including a suite of paintings from the early 1930s featuring a handsome man presumed to be her boyfriend at the time. They show him playing a ukulele, looking pensive with his head resting on his hand, sawing wood and lying on the floor, each canvas rendered in a style that indicates she was looking at European modernists, including Picasso and other cubists.
Like Hibi, with whom she was friends, she had studied at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). The place was remarkably diverse in the 1920s and ’30s, as demonstrated by a pair of paintings on view: Hibi’s 1926 portrait of an African American man in a cobalt suit against a red background, and another, smaller canvas by a Chinese American artist, Yun Gee, depicting Hayakawa painting the very same portrait. When Hayakawa’s work was featured in a big retrospective at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Institute just shy of her 30th birthday, she was called a genius by the San Francisco Examiner’s art critic — who was himself an immigrant from India.
This milieu was all the more amazing considering it was happening during the decades of Asian exclusion, marked by laws that restricted Asian immigration, prevented Asian immigrants already in the United States from becoming citizens and barred immigrants and citizens alike from owning property. (Some of these laws were only fully lifted in 1965.)
Three prewar landscapes open the show: Hayakawa’s “From My Window” (1935), which looks past a vase of peonies to San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill; Okubo’s rustic “Ice House” (circa 1937); and Hibi’s Cézanne-esque vision of the California countryside, “Sprint #2, Hayward” (1940).
They stand in sharp contrast to a later grouping of paintings made by Hibi and Okubo after they arrived at the Tanforan Assembly Center in 1942, their first stop before being transferred to Topaz. (The Smithsonian curator Melissa Ho has done a terrific job with the installation, so that such resonances are clear.) At Tanforan, a former horse racing track, inmates were housed in stables, which they had to renovate themselves to make habitable — a fact alluded to in a 1943 gouache by Okubo, “The Camps Were Unfinished So the Evacuees Had to Prepare for Living There.”
The camp wardens permitted the incarcerated people to establish art schools, including one at Topaz that was run by Hibi’s husband, the artist Matsusaburo George Hibi, and where she and Okubo taught. Hisako Hibi later recalled that “Caucasian friends” and support groups would keep them supplied with materials. Okubo also contributed to the Topaz Times, a newspaper published with her camp mates. The two women made hundreds of drawings and paintings while in the camps, creating a collective portrait of a community under duress.
Okubo took a diaristic approach, focusing on everyday life, as with “Sunday” (1943), depicting three older women clutching their bibles and pulling their coats close against the cold, on their way to Sunday services. She would later turn such observations into the earliest firsthand account of the experience of Japanese Americans during the period of incarceration, “Citizen 13660,” published in 1946, drawings for which are also on view.
And Okubo also made emotionally charged charcoal drawings. In one, children grasp at barbed wire, while another shows two women having a distressing conversation (both circa 1942-44); their style evokes Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” another work about the injustices of war.
Hibi’s images of the camps are, not surprisingly, somber, even depressing. Decades after her release, she spoke of the “fear, frustration and anxiety” she felt, and the humiliating conditions she had endured. “Tanforan Assembly Center” (1942) is a bird’s-eye view of the barracks, packed like sardines within the oval racetrack, hemmed in by dun-colored mountains beyond, entirely devoid of human life. The red skies of “Eastern Sky, 7:50 A.M.” (1945) and “Western Sky, Topaz, Utah” (1945) seem apocalyptic, like something out of an Edvard Munch fever dream.
While her graceful and colorful still lifes from the period seem far removed from the heaviness of the conditions in the camps, their flowers, fruit and vegetables were the product of her fellow inmates’ backbreaking labor in a landscape not at all conducive to farming.
Hayakawa showed her work actively in the 1940s and early ’50s at museums in New Mexico, but her career was cut short by her death in 1953 at age 53.
Even while Okubo was incarcerated, she continued to send work to exhibitions around the country, some of them organized by activists who opposed the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans. An editor at Forbes saw her work at one of these shows and invited her to contribute to the magazine; the job offer allowed her to leave the camp before the end of the war.
She supported herself as an illustrator in New York City. Eventually she devoted herself full time to her art; her painting style became playful, almost childlike, incorporating pictographs, bright colors and round-faced characters, as in “Boy, Rooster, Cat” (1964) and “Boy, Goat, Fruit” (before 1972). Her first solo exhibition was at the Oakland Museum in 1972.
Because Hibi and her family could not secure employment outside the West Coast — a condition the government set for release of those who were incarcerated — they were some of the last people to depart Topaz. They too moved to New York, where Hibi sustained her family by working as a seamstress, while continuing to paint. She and her husband were both diagnosed with cancer shortly after their release; he died in 1947, and she was left to raise their children.
She eventually moved back to San Francisco, in 1954, where she worked in a garment factory and then as a housekeeper to a socialite artist. The mood of her paintings seemed to lift in the California sun. Works like “Poems by Madame Takeko Kujo” — made in 1970, the year of her first solo exhibition — are done in a light-filled, lyrical, almost fully abstract style that incorporates delicate calligraphy.
That this exhibition exists at all is a small miracle, because much of the work made by these painters before 1942 is difficult to track down — Hibi and her husband entrusted their work with a friend when they had to leave their home, and it was eventually lost; much of Hayakawa’s disappeared into unrecorded private collections. But what the curator, ShiPu Wang, has managed to assemble is a revelation, not least because it’s an important reminder, as the incoming presidential administration talks of mass deportations of immigrants and the end of birthright citizenship, of an earlier moment in this country’s history — and of the artists who recorded it, and survived.
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