Exhibition at the Barnes highlights Japanese artists from WWII internment camps

Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia highlights Japanese American artists held in WWII internment camps

“Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America” traces the lives and works of six formerly interned artists whose works helped shape American culture.

• Peter Crimmins

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Two defining images of midcentury American pop culture were the colorful abstract cover of Dave Brubeck’s bestselling “Time Out” album and the ominous mannequin puppet strings that dangled on the front of Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather.”

They shared a designer, one who might seem least likely to have produced such emblematic American pop art: Sadamitsu Fujita, a Japanese American graphic artist who had been incarcerated in a World War II internment camp.

The Barnes Foundation has created a wall of his many familiar album covers and book jackets in its new exhibition “Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America.”

“Everybody knows ‘The Godfather.’ Nobody knows Fujita,” said curator Cindy Kang. “I hope now you will know Fujita.”

“Noguchi to Asawa” traces the impact that internment camps had on six Japanese American artists: sculptor Isamu Noguchi, furniture maker George Nakashima, sculptor Leo Amino, fiber artist Kay Sekimachi, sculptor Ruth Asawa and Fujita.

The six did not work together, nor did they form any kind of collective. Some knew others in this group, some did not. Kang said all shaped American culture and fine art, and their wartime confinement had a lasting impact on their work.

“In many histories of these artists, this period of their life is treated as an isolated, terrible, traumatic, unfortunate incident that then they moved on from,” she said. “What I was trying to trace is the vestige of that experience, to see how grief and damage and injury are still part of these works, with the beauty, with the exquisite aesthetics. You cannot disentangle them.”

Showing a complicated history for America’s 250th anniversary

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, there was widespread public panic that anyone of Japanese heritage might pose a threat to the United States’ war efforts.

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that forcibly sent about 120,000 people of Japanese descent to internment camps. About 80,000 of them were U.S. citizens.

Most were kept in the camps for up to three years. It has been estimated that the internees lost an estimated$400 million to over $1 billion in lost wages, property and businesses.

The Barnes Foundation has been marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with art exhibitions that reference complicated aspects of American history: the nation’s relationship with Native Americans with work by the artistSky Hopkina, of the Ho-Chunk Nation; with African Americans in the multimedia exhibition“Freedom Dreams;” and now with Japanese Americans in “Noguchi to Asawa.”

Executive Director Thom Collins said the temporary exhibitions give the Barnes an opportunity to showcase artists who were overlooked in the past.

“Many honor our founder Dr. [Albert] Barnes’s commitment to racial equality and social justice, celebrating artists who are Black, indigenous, people of color and women,” Collins said. “This year, the curatorial team devised a thoughtful slate of exhibitions and installations highlighting American artists of diverse and varied perspectives.”

Being in America, but not of it

“Noguchi to Asawa” begins with blank walls papered entirely in black to mimic the tarpaper barracks that housed internment inmates. Visible heads of roofing nails reinforce the image of makeshift accommodations.

“The prelude into the exhibition is heavy,” said exhibition designer Stephanie Goto. “We wanted to create that heaviness in a way that was aesthetically beautiful and uplifting, but at the same time you could feel the darkness.”

The next gallery, also papered in black, displays artifacts from the camps, including stark landscape paintings Asawa and Sekimachi made while in the camps, and a collection of small tree branches that Amino, Nakashima and Noguchi had gathered and saved for decades.

It was common for camp inmates toforage for fallen branches to be repurposed as furniture or household items in the otherwise bare barracks.

“In the case of these artists, they collected these branches not just as scrap material for household goods, but they also collected them and carved them into sculpture,” Kang said. “The fact that they saved them shows how important they were in terms of embodying this traumatic experience that they all went through.”

The rest of the exhibition opens into large, bright spaces with midcentury colors and aesthetics in which many of the artists worked.

George Nakashima, one of the progenitors of the Studio Furniture movement of the 1930s, was born in Washington state. He made furniture in Seattle before his forced relocation to a camp in Idaho. Nakashima was released in 1943 and settled in New Hope, Pennsylvania.His house and studio is now a nationally registered historic site and visitor attraction.

The Barnes exhibition has his first furniture catalogue, featuring blueprint designs for tables and chairs with a statement that announced his approach to furniture.

“To seek a sweet, deep silence…an existence within an existence,” reads the catalogue. “Still it must relate to the world around it although not a part of it.”

Nearby are suspended wire sculptures by Asawa: finely wrought, elongated pieces of interlocking lobes. The works are meant to “define the air without stealing it from anyone,” according to wall text quotes from the artist.

Noting Amino’s sculptures of transparent glass blocks and Sekimachi’s delicately woven textiles that hang like wisps of gauze, Kang said the artists practiced an aesthetic of invisibility.

“I was trying to express through this exhibition that sense of humility that comes through in the artist’s work,” she said, “There is something very muted, but very powerful in their journeys and in the work that they created after having gone through these experiences.”

The exhibition is peppered with the pieces designed for domestic spaces: A Nakashima credenza, a Noguchi lamp, a Sekimachi placemat and even a box of Bugles corn snacks designed by Fujita in 1964.

“There is a history of Americans valuing the objects that are created more than the people,” Kang said. “What I’m trying to do in this exhibition is to bring the people back into the picture, to value the people as much as the objects that they created.”

“Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America” will be on view at the Barnes Foundation until Jan. 10.

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