This exhibition is organized to mark the eightieth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II. Including a selection of works by Japanese American artists, some of whom were incarcerated and others whose lives were shaped indirectly by the widespread impact of the Executive Order, the exhibition represents an array of photographic and sculptural experiments following an event marking the height of anti-Japanese sentiment in the twentieth century.
It includes a small selection of works made by as yet unidentified Japanese Americans in the concentration camps. They are presented alongside work by Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Joseph Goto, Hiromu Kira, Toyo Miyatake, and Toshiko Takaezu. By gathering together works such as Isamu Noguchi’s haunting wood and bone Monument to Heroes (1943), Kay Sekimachi’s ethereal hanging fiber work Ogawa II (1969), and Patrick Nagatani’s 1994 photographs of the former sites of Japanese American concentration camps in Utah and Idaho, the exhibition presents a range of approaches to abstraction developed following the era of Japanese American incarceration.