No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration

No Monument: In The Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration The Noguchi Museum March 16–May 15, 2022

Genji Amino and Christina Hiromi Hobbs

No Monument: In The Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration Genji Amino and Christina Hiromi Hobbs Guest Curators

On the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the issuance of Executive Order 9066, which effectively authorized the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II, No Monument responds to the ambivalent status of commemoration and memorialization of historical trauma in light of the artistic experiments of Japanese Americans whose silences, refusals, studies, and dreams persist in its wake. Recalling the government’s disavowal of state violence against Japanese Americans in the name of military necessity and the subsequent foreclosure of the “view from within” 1 the camps as the result of a legally enforced camera ban, No Monument attends to alternative orders of memory invoked by artists imagining unforeseeable futures and facing an uncertain present. Given that sculpture and photography have historically been understood in relation to monumentalism and the documentation of historical events, No Monument returns to these media in order to reconsider what it means to represent and remember the incarceration.

Insofar as the Executive Order would irreparably transform not only the collective memory but also the historical record of Japanese American arts in the twentieth century, the wake of the incarceration extends as much into the history preceding the historical event as into that which came after. In the destruction of memorabilia, ephemera, and print culture compelled by the hysteria to expose disloyalty among the community, dispossession occurred not only at the level of property but also at the level of history. In an effort to destroy records of any connection to Japan and any evidence that could be construed as proof of espionage following the camera ban, a large body of Japanese American studio and vernacular photography was destroyed along with the social and art histories it carried. At the same time that it occasioned the destruction of artwork, the incarceration both

compelled new art forms among those inventing in order to survive and informed the development of art histories among those separated from the camps either by generation or geography.

In collaboration with the estates of several of the featured artists and the Japanese American National Museum, No Monument takes as its point of departure the exceptional heterogeneity of Japanese American wartime experience, gathering together works by artists living on the West Coast who were incarcerated following the Executive Order, those living in Hawai‘i under martial law after Pearl Harbor, and those on the East Coast who protested the incarceration while living under threat but not confinement. Presenting works that have been celebrated alongside those that have been overlooked, those of the professionally trained alongside those of the self-taught, and those elevated as fine art alongside those historically relegated to craft or design, No Monument features the work of as yet to be named Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during the war alongside that of artists Leo Amino, Ruth Asawa, Joseph Goto, Hiromu Kira, Toyo Miyatake, Patrick Nagatani, Isamu Noguchi, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu.

Rather than considering the historical record of the incarceration as a documentary resource for the monumentalization of a racialized figure—a testament to suffering and resilience in the face of dispossession, exclusion, and containment 2 —No Monument features works that engage with abstraction as a mode of address that eludes monumentalization. In the place of a romance of resistance or the pathos of sacrifice, the exhibition offers a reflection on what it means to remember an event rendered unrepresentable by official narratives and unspeakable by collective trauma. If at mid-century the notion of the monument offered a figure through which to reckon with the prospect of the “end of man”3 threatened by nuclear apocalypse, the secondary effects of this monumental figuration had lasting implications for Japanese Americans living out the containment and surveillance that sustained imaginaries of military detente and total war. Exploring unrecognized affinities among Japanese American artists working during this period, No Monument looks to alternative vocabularies of

Installation view, No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration, The Noguchi Museum, New York. In the center: Isamu Noguchi, Sentinel, 1973. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY © INFGM /ARS PREVIOUS PAGE

Toyo Miyatake, Untitled (Manzanar), c. 1942–45. © Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection.

Installation view, No Monument.

remembrance and speculation in the face of an experience of modernity not as impending threat but as an ongoing state of emergency.

The gallery that opens the exhibition stages the specificity of artists’ immediate experience of incarceration on the West Coast, at the same time that it points toward the heterogeneity of Japanese American wartime experience even within this context. This gallery includes Issei artist Toyo Miyatake, incarcerated with his family at the Manzanar concentration camp in California; Nisei artist Ruth Asawa, incarcerated as a teenager at the Rohwer concentration camp in Arkansas; and mixed-race, East Coast–based artist Isamu Noguchi, who was voluntarily incarcerated for a period of six months at the Poston concentration camp in Arizona.

Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979) opened a photography studio in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles in 1923, where he was a member of Shaku-dosha, a prominent photography club, and organized exhibitions of the work of Edward Weston in the 1920s and early ’30s. When Miyatake was incarcerated at Manzanar, he managed to smuggle in a lens and film holder, and with the assistance of a carpenter built a camera and began taking clandestine photographs of the camp, resulting in one

of the few bodies of photography produced by Japanese Americans during the incarceration. The entrance to the exhibition is framed by two of the artist’s photographs in reverse-chronological order: Row of Barracks (c. 1942–45), and Evergreen Cemetery Tombstone (1925). These two works simultaneously present and exceed the conventional limits for popular representations of the history of the incarceration: where the first would seem to present this history in terms of documentary evidence, the second would appear to present its memory as an occasion for monumentalization. In fact, this apparent alternative between representations of the incarceration as authoritative history or tragic memory, as document or monument, is troubled by the oeuvre of an artist whose work addressed both his community and a wider public through compositional methods that spanned figuration and abstraction. This juxtaposition of reference and abstraction is rejoined in the adjoining gallery by a pairing of Miyatake’s earlier Study in Light Abstract (1931) with the photographer’s iconic representation of a hand poised to cut the barbed wire of the camps, Untitled (Opening Image from Valediction) (1944).

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Toyo Miyatake, Row of Barracks, c. 1942–45, Evergreen Cemetery Tombstone, 1925, Study in Light Abstract, 1931, Untitled (Opening Image from Valediction), 1944. © Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), whose family had been working as farmers in California under the imposition of Alien Land Laws that prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning land, was a teenager when her father was arrested by the FBI following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Her family was then relocated to the Santa Anita temporary detention center before being incarcerated at a camp in Rohwer, Arkansas.

Asawa’s hanging looped-wire sculptures belie the mass and architectural foundation traditionally associated with sculpture as well as the permanence and scale often associated with monumentality. Drawing on Mexican practices of basket weaving historically understood as craft circumscribed by time and place rather than as fine art with a universal and timeless horizon of address, Asawa’s forms do not cast a view across history from on high but rather give themselves to be seen from below. The artist’s untitled sculpture featured in the exhibition presents a series of nested enclosures that appear to be independent of one another but are in fact woven out of a continuous surface. In the context of the exhibition, these interdependencies illustrate recursive spatial and temporal structures in which surface and depth become difficult to distinguish. Asawa’s investigations of formal contingency and intimacy display an entanglement of perspectives where one might expect an autonomous body, and obscurity at the heart of an ostensibly transparent, self-evident form.

Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was a Japanese American sculptor of mixed white and Japanese descent with an established reputation at the time of the Executive Order’s announcement. His residency in New York placed him outside of the order’s jurisdiction. Choosing to voluntarily enter the camp at Poston in May 1942 with the hope of developing an arts program and even constructing park and recreation areas at the camp, he would obtain permission for a temporary leave six months later in order to return to the East Coast for the duration of the war. The works by Noguchi included in the exhibition are remarkable for their ambivalence about the prospect of monumentalization, at once an influential framework and a dubious or even problematic premise for many histories of people of color following the war. The artist’s sculpture Monument to Heroes was completed in 1943 following his voluntary imprisonment. Rather than representing a definitive or historical figure of sacrifice or resilience, Monument to Heroes proposes a relationship to memory governed by the continuum of revelation and concealment reflected in the changing relationship of surface to interior as it is viewed in the round. This tentative figuration

LEFT Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.032, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), c. 1962. Private collection.

Photo: Nicholas Knight © Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./ ARS. Courtesy David Zwirner RIGHT Isamu Noguchi, Monument to Heroes, 1943.

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY. Photo: Kevin Noble © INFGM /ARS

and the unevenness of its registration for the viewer serves to frame the question of the submerged memory of the incarceration, the legacy of which is distributed unevenly across the country and the wounds of which are alternatively visible and invisible from different historical positions. Noguchi’s later stainless-steel work Sentinel (1973), which presides over the first gallery of the exhibition, presents a gateway that is also a barrier, a foundation that is also a facade, and a border that also marks off an interim. It is this suspension of passage, the notion of space and time both repressed and reserved, that the exhibition seeks to investigate.

Japanese Americans rendered out of sight and out of time by the incarceration, forbidden by law to render the space of the camps through photography, turned to other means of marking time 4 in order to redress the censure of the critique of state-sanctioned violence and dispossession at the level of the means of representation. With their foreseeable futures foreclosed by displacement and the trauma of their immediate past made inaccessible by national consensus, Japanese Americans addressed their works to an uninhabitable present in order to make it livable. These practices of survival were so bound up with the time and space of the incarceration that they were often abandoned in the transition to resettlement following the war, leaving little behind for the historical record. The small number of photographs by Japanese Americans who found ways to defy the camera ban speaks similarly to an urgent recording of an unreliable present, providing an antidote to the romantic monumentalization of Japanese American sacrifice in the widely circulated camp photographs taken

by Ansel Adams.

The centerpiece of the second, main gallery of the exhibition is a hanging work by Bay Area–born weaver Kay Sekimachi (b. 1926), who was incarcerated at age fifteen with her family at the Topaz concentration camp in Utah. Following her studies in painting, drawing, and origami begun at the Topaz Art School, founded at the camp by painter Chiura Obata, Sekimachi would take up weaving after World War II under the tutelage of Trude Guermonprez at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. The nylon

ABOVE & FOLLOWING PAGE Installation view, No Monument. In the center: Kay Sekimachi, Ogawa II, 1969. Forrest L. Merrill Collection. © Kay Sekimachi

monofilament work featured in the exhibition, Ogawa II (1969), carries this practice into experiment with the new material of plastic to create an ethereal form that appears suspended as much in space as in time. Bearing a title that is both a common Japanese last name and also translates as “stream,” it is featured in order to frame a spectral inheritance that is as persistent across generations as it is elusive to the historical record. As the viewer moves about the sculpture, it casts its uneven silhouette over the other works in the gallery, alternately accompanying, embracing, or obscuring them.

Hiromu Kira (1898–1991) was born in Hawai‘i and educated in Japan before moving with his family to Seattle as a young man, where he became a founding member of the Seattle Camera Club. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1926, he befriended members of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California and began to exhibit nationally and internationally in association with the prewar pictorialist movement.

During the war he and his family were incarcerated at the Santa Anita temporary detention center and the Gila River concentration camp in Arizona, effectively ending his career and practice as a studio photographer. The works by Kira that survive were recovered from

ABOVE Hiromu Kira, The Thinker, c. 1930, printed later.

Dennis Reed Collection © Sadamura Family Trust RIGHT Hiromu Kira, Glass Circles (Curves), c. 1929, printed later.

Dennis Reed Collection © Sadamura Family Trust

the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles, where the photographer had hidden them for the duration of the war. Both of the photographs featured, Glass Circles (Curves) (c. 1929) and The Thinker (c. 1930), are representative of Kira’s pictorialist practice in Los Angeles prior to the war. These abstractions, playing on ambiguities of surface and depth, transparency and opacity, are placed alongside works made by incarcerees in order to provoke questions about what can be figured of the histories of art foreclosed by the incarceration, and what remains still to be understood about those art histories brought into being by the constraints imposed by the event.

Patrick Nagatani (1945–2017), the youngest artist included in the exhibition, knew the incarceration only through inherited memory passed down by his parents and grandparents who were incarcerated during the war at concentration camps in Manzanar, California, and Jerome, Arkansas. In his “Japanese-American Concentration Camp” series, the Sansei photographer depicts images from his pilgrimages to each of the ten major camps during the early 1990s, more than a half century after their closing. Choosing to frame the legacy of the incarceration not in terms of documentary evidence or demonstrable harm but as traces of history at the limit of visibility, Nagatani offers a provocative alternative to conventional representations of the camps.

The two pairs of the artist’s photographs on display, set in dialogue with the arrangements of the works of forerunner photographers Miyatake and Kira on facing walls of the gallery, present juxtapositions of images of the Topaz camp in Delta, Utah, and those of the Minidoka camp in Hunt, Idaho. The two photographs on the first of the adjoining walls featuring Nagatani’s work present the visible remainder of these histories in the form of discarded construction materials and abandoned structural foundations, joining Noguchi’s Monument to Heroes in asking what remains are available to memory for the figuration of events that elude public record. The second set of prints displays landscapes that bear no visible trace of the camps they formerly held. Forming a continuous horizon line along this wall, these prints establish a background against which emerge the sculptures of Japanese Americans without a direct relationship to

Patrick Nagatani, Topaz, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Utah, October 14, 1994, 1994.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani

Patrick Nagatani, Minidoka, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Idaho, October 15, 1994, 1994.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani

Patrick Nagatani, Minidoka, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Idaho, October 15, 1994, 1994.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani

Patrick Nagatani, Topaz, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Utah, October 14, 1994, 1994.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani

the incarceration, prompting a reconsideration of the social histories latent within a body of abstraction until now considered too remote from the incarceration to have been informed by it.

The unattributed works in the exhibition borrowed from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, housed at the Japanese American National Museum, include carved nameplates and other works in wood such as kobu sculpture, or found cypress root stripped of its outer bark. During the final years of the war, Eaton began his collection and documentation of the arts of incarcerees, which would culminate in the publication of Beauty Behind Barbed Wire in 1952.

Eaton’s framing of this work in terms of a Japanese “genius for making something out of nothing”5 served at once as a celebration of Japanese American resilience and an alibi for the violence of the incarceration. This orientalizing notion of an aesthetic proclivity capable of transcending human circumstance became the symbol of sacrifice, resilience, and industry of a model minority whose bright future must be guaranteed by the disavowal of its past. No Monument seeks to reconsider these works as experiments in living to be

LEFT Carved wood nameplates, c. 1942–45, from the traveling exhibition Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, organized by Japanese American National Museum. Installation view, No Monument. Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, Japanese American National Museum BELOW Wood sculptures, c. 1942–45, from Contested Histories. Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, Japanese American National Museum, #2015.100.56 (left) and #2015.100.60

appreciated in relation to the formal experiments of fine artists who in their own ways were attempting to imagine freedom in a space of constraint, and survival in the face of uncertainty. As many of the works from the Eaton Collection were made in disparate concentration camps by incarcerees who have yet to be identified, and perhaps without a public in mind beyond the surrounding community, their presentation within the exhibition serves to call into question the parameters of history, memory, and commemoration.

LEFT Leo Amino, Composition #8, 1947. © Estate of Leo Amino RIGHT Joseph Goto, Untitled, c. 1965.

Photo: Nicholas Knight © Goto Family Collection

Japanese Americans living outside the militarized zones established by the Executive Order, even if they avoided confinement, could not avoid their implication in this era of anti-Japanese sentiment and the peculiar temporalities it implied for aesthetic and political action and redress. The works of three sculptors who did not experience the incarceration directly are gathered along one side of the main gallery of the exhibition, opposite the works borrowed from the Japanese American National Museum arranged along the facing wall.

Leo Amino (1911–1989), although based in the Bay Area for the first six years following his immigration to the United States as a young man in 1929, was by the time of the Executive Order working in New York as an artist with a promising career. Following Pearl Harbor, he was interrogated by police, placed under surveillance and travel restrictions, and made to translate for the Navy for the duration of World War II. Still, in stark contrast to his West Coast counterparts, he was allowed to retain his residence, his employment, his tools, and even to pursue a successful artistic career on the East Coast. Amino’s pathmaking experiments with the new medium of plastics, developed after the declassification of polyester resin by the military following the close of the war, provides an insight into an alternative technological

and cosmic imaginary forged in the wake of nuclear war and its legacy for Japanese both in the United States and abroad. Suspended between gestation and degeneration, Amino’s Composition #8 (1947) suggests as much an amber preservation of organic historical remains as it does a laboratory for the development of an uncertain and unprecedented future. Composed only two years following the war in the intimate scale most preferred by the artist, the work operates in dissent from either the tragic pessimism or the techno-positivism of mid-century monumental sculpture, extending instead a sensuous invitation into a speculative temporality that refuses either to romanticize or disavow the destruction in the wake of which a new life must be imagined.

Joseph Goto (1916–1994) spent his formative years in Hawai‘i, where he learned to weld metal while working for the military during World War II. He witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which he would later characterize as a critical moment in both his life and his development as an artist. During the war, Goto enlisted in the United States Army, where he was exposed to the welding techniques that would shape his later growth as a fine artist. Developing steel sculpture as his primary medium while enrolled at the Art

Institute of Chicago following the war, Goto, like Noguchi, would move between a scale suggestive of monumental construction and that of the miniature. Goto’s sculptures imply more than a heroic condemnation of the machinery of war, opening onto an engagement with temporalities of displacement and obsolescence. The sculpture, at once imposing and abject, appears burdened by its own weight.

A decommissioned instrument of industry hesitating between movement and stasis, it appears to be situated simultaneously inside and outside of history.

Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011), born in Hawai‘i to Okinawan parents, remained in the area during this period of heightened discrimination in which costly demonstrations of loyalty were demanded of Hawai‘ianborn Japanese. The artist’s brother was wounded while serving in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated army unit of Japanese American soldiers. These wartime hardships, however, did not prevent Takaezu from pursuing her first studies in ceramics and sculpture—

Toshiko Takaezu, Untitled, n.d.

Private collection Photo: Nicholas Knight ©Toshiko Takaezu Foundation

the former with founders of the Hawai‘i Potters’ Guild Hugh and Lita Gantt, and the latter with guild member Lieutenant Carl Massa, who would remain a teacher and mentor throughout her life. Following the war she continued her studies in ceramics at the University of Hawai‘i and then at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. The artist’s closed-form sculptures reference functional vessels but are functionless, often constructed to hold only the empty space the artist would often describe as the most crucial element of her works despite its invisibility to the naked eye. Sometimes, however, as is the case with the untitled work included in the exhibition, these forms are composed with hidden potential for sound. This work encloses a rattle that, because of the size and weight of the ceramic enclosure, remains functionally inactive, inert. In the context of the exhibition, the sculpture presents an occasion for reflection on what it means to hold and to keep silence, and the ways in which silence has been and continues to be a medium of memory.

The alternatives to monumentalism featured in this exhibition, produced both by those who were incarcerated and those whose lives were shaped indirectly by the widespread impact of the Executive Order, speak to the legacies of these histories through their embrace of materials, orders of scale, and compositional strategies that evoke questions of contingency, mutability, and transparency. These inquiries into the parameters of the visible and the limits of representational capture, undertaken by artists negotiating the proscription of their legal, social, and civic recognition, shed light on the latent memory and speculative potential conveyed by the art produced in the wake of the incarceration.

1 Karin Higa, The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps,

1942–1945 (Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles, 1992).

2 Emily Roxworthy, The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity

and World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).

3 Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture between War

and Peace, 1945–1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

4 Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Boston:

Harvard University Press, 2020).

5 Allen H. Eaton, Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War

Relocation Camps (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952).

No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, March 16–May 15, 2022 Guest-curated by Genji Amino with Christina Hiromi Hobbs

Works in the Exhibition Toyo Miyatake Row of Barracks, c. 1942–45 Gelatin silver print 8 x 9 7/8 in.

Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection

Toyo Miyatake Evergreen Cemetery Tombstone, 1925 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14 in.

Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection

Isamu Noguchi Monument to Heroes, 1943 Cardboard, string, wood, bone 28 1/4 x 13 5/8 x 9 3/4 in.

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY

Ruth Asawa Untitled (S.032, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form), c. 1962 Copper wire 19 1/2 x 26 1/2 x 26 1/2 in.

Private collection, New York

Toyo Miyatake Untitled (Manzanar), c. 1942–45 Gelatin silver print 7 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.

Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection

Isamu Noguchi Sentinel, 1973 Stainless steel 71 3/8 x 70 1/2 x 28 5/8 in.

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY

Patrick Nagatani Topaz, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Utah, October 14, 1994, 1994 Chromogenic print 11 x 14 in.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani

Patrick Nagatani Minidoka, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Idaho, October 15, 1994, 1994 Chromogenic print 11 x 14 in.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani Toshiko Takaezu Untitled, n.d.

Ceramic with rattle 33 x 14 x 14 in.

Private collection

Patrick Nagatani Minidoka, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Idaho, October 15, 1994, 1994 Chromogenic print 11 x 14 in.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani Leo Amino Composition #8, 1947 Polyester resin 10 7/16 × 9 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.

Estate of Leo Amino Patrick Nagatani Topaz, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, Utah, October 14, 1994, 1994 Chromogenic print 11 x 14 in.

Courtesy of Andrew Smith Gallery © Estate of Patrick Nagatani Joseph Goto Untitled, c. 1965 Welded steel 11 x 20 x 16 in.

Goto Family Collection

Toyo Miyatake Study in Light Abstract, 1931 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 in.

Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection Toyo Miyatake Untitled (Opening Image from Valediction), 1944 Gelatin silver print 13 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.

Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection Unidentified artist Wood sculpture, c. 1942–45, from the traveling exhibition Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, organized by the Japanese American National Museum 7 x 11 x 6 in.

Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, Japanese American National Museum, #2015.100.56 Nameplates, c. 1942–45, from Contested Histories Various dimensions Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, Japanese American National Museum

Unidentified artist Wood sculpture, c. 1942–45, from Contested Histories 4 ¼ x 10 x 5 ⅞ in.

Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection, Japanese American National Museum, #2015.100.60 Hiromu Kira Glass Circles (Curves), c. 1929, printed later Gelatin silver print 20 x 16 in.

Dennis Reed Collection © Sadamura Family Trust Hiromu Kira The Thinker, c. 1930, printed later Gelatin silver print 16 x 20 in.

Dennis Reed Collection © Sadamura Family Trust Kay Sekimachi Ogawa II, 1969 Nylon monofilament, glass beads, clear plastic tubes 76 x 10 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.

Forrest L. Merrill Collection

Text © 2022 Genji Amino and Christina Hiromi Hobbs All installation photography

by Nicholas Knight

FRONT COVER Kay Sekimachi Ogawa II, 1969. Forrest L. Merrill Collection. © Kay Sekimachi

BACK COVER Toyo Miyatake Untitled (Manzanar), c. 1942–45. © Toyo Miyatake Studio Collection

This exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of the Japanese American National Museum, which has graciously loaned works from Contested Histories and has organized a pop-up presentation of the collection and public programs at The Noguchi Museum, April 8–10, 2022, in conjunction with No Monument.

The curators owe their gratitude to the Estate of Leo Amino, the Estate of Ruth Asawa, the Estate of Joseph Goto, the Estate of Hiromu Kira, the Estate of Patrick Nagatani, the Toyo Miyatake Studio, and the Toshiko Takaezu Studio, as well as to Dennis Reed, Forrest L. Merrill, Andrew Smith Gallery, and Jonathan Laib at David Zwirner Gallery.

Exhibitions at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York, are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.