(NAME-MCE) Artworks Created In Wartime Internment Camps On Display At UConn's Benton

[Bill Howe]

courant.com/entertainment/museums/galleries/hc-campart.artmar05,0,4222398.st
ory


Courant.com


Such Desolate Beauty


Artworks Created In Wartime Internment Camps On Display At UConn's Benton


By JESSE LEAVENWORTH

Courant Staff Writer

March 5, 2008

 

Delphine Hirasuna had proposed a slew of titles for her book about the art
and ingenuity of Japanese Americans held in U.S. prison camps during World
War II.

Hirasuna said she fought, in particular, for "Desolate Beauty," because it
evoked the people's creative spirit amid the camps' barren surroundings. The
publisher, however, thought that sounded too much like a romance novel.

As the publishing deadline loomed, Hirasuna recalled comments she had heard
repeatedly from Japanese Americans who loaned her teapots hewed from solid
slate, floral jewelry made with seashells, and chests carved from packing
crates. They had all said, "What could we do? We were stuck. This was our
way to go on."

One Japanese word embodied that attitude of accepting adversity with
patience and dignity: "gaman." So the book, published in 2005 by Ten Speed
Press, became "The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American
Internment Camps/1942-46" ($35), which is also the title of an ongoing
exhibit at the University of Connecticut's William Benton Museum of Art in
Storrs
<http://www.courant.com/topic/us/connecticut/tolland-county/storrs-PLGEO1001
00207100000.topic> .

Collected from Japanese Americans living on the Pacific Coast, items on
display include paintings, wood and stone carvings, furniture, cutting
instruments, jewelry, dolls, clothing and Buddhist shrines.

"I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to show the human side of people
who were incarcerated," said Hirasuna, a free-lance writer whose parents
were held in one of the camps. "People get reduced to numbers. What I like
about the show - what I'm continually moved by - [is that] it really shows
the humanity of these people. You feel the warmth of these people. To me,
that's why I feel that this show is important."

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, many Americans felt
nothing but raw hatred for those with even a drop of Japanese blood. Seen as
a threat to national security, some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry,
about two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were shuttled to camps in the
deserts and swamplands of the western U.S. Adults, and children were held
behind barbed wire and watched by armed guards.

Uprooted from their homes with little notice, the internees brought nothing
more than what they could carry. The camps were spartan, so families
scrounged for scrap wood, metal and other materials to fashion simple
furniture and other necessities.

"The Art of Gaman" features chairs, chests and tables made from crates,
sandals made with rope and scrap wood, and knives and scissors hammered from
scrap metal in the barracks' boilers. The internees also wove baskets from
crepe paper and wire and a cigarette case from waxy onion sack string. They
painted playing cards on electrical insulation boards and carved a heart
pendant from a red toothbrush handle.

Although they weren't artists, the mostly first-generation Japanese
Americans who made the majority of the items had been raised in a culture of
decorative arts, Benton Museum director Steven Kern said.

Kern learned of the collection when his wife brought Hirasuna's book home
from the Mansfield library. Because he was passionate about Japanese art and
intrigued by the mix of that art with Western culture, Kern said he became
immediately interested in bringing the exhibit to Connecticut.

The collection, shown previously in California
<http://www.courant.com/topic/us/california-PLGEO100100100000000.topic>  and
Oregon <http://www.courant.com/topic/us/oregon-PLGEO1001040000000000.topic>
, also fits the human-rights-themed exhibitions the Benton has hosted the
past several years, Kern said. Other current exhibitions at the museum,
meant to complement "The Art of Gaman," include photographs by Ansel Adams
<http://www.courant.com/topic/arts-culture/ansel-adams-PEHST000011.topic>
of California's Manzanar War Relocation Center; "Tagged," by Pamina Traylor,
featuring artwork also centered on the internment camps and described on the
Benton website as "a meditation on the nature of ethnic prejudice"; and
"Manzanar and Tule Lake: A Soundscape," an audio recording from two camps by
Richard Lerman.

The exhibit also coincides with the opening, at Hartford's Real Art Ways on
Friday, of a two-movie program focusing on Japanese-American internment. The
feature documentary "Passing Poston: An American Story," about the Poston
camp in Arizona, will be shown with the short documentary "Pilgrimage,"
about Manzanar.

The Benton's exhibits, Kern said, are "absolutely relevant to issues today,"
particularly the post- 9/11
<http://www.courant.com/topic/unrest-conflicts-war/terrorism/september-11-20
01-attacks-EVHST000001.topic>  prejudice against Arab Americans. In her
book, Hirasuna calls the internment centers "concentration camps," a term
that some U.S. officials also used. But both Kern and Hirasuna said they do
not equate the U.S. camps with Nazi killing centers in Germany and Poland.

"There's no way in hell I'm trying to compare this with what happened in
Europe," Hirasuna said.

Still, many Japanese Americans imprisoned during the war lost their homes,
farms and savings. The community living and lack of privacy in the camps
upended the traditional family structure. Some people fell into deep
depression. Some killed themselves.

Often, Hirasuna said, when someone in a camp was depressed, a group of
ladies would bring things of beauty - a flower, or a carved wooden bird - to
cheer the person. That spirit of perseverance and creativity, she said, is
at the heart of the exhibition.

"THE ART OF GAMAN" continues through March 30 at the William Benton Museum
of Art in Storrs. For museum hours and other information, visit
www.thebenton.org.



 

 

 

Bill Howe 

Web - http://www.billhowe.org <http://www.billhowe.org/> 
Blog - Travel - http://billhowe.org/BillBlog/
Blog - Multicultural Education - http://billhowe.org/MCE/

 

**Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) - http://apaact.com/

 

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