Reflections of Internment: The Art of Hawaii's Hiroshi Honda (exhibition)

Exhibition of paintings by Hawai'i Kibei artist Hiroshi Honda, most of which depict the various internment and concentration camps he was held in during World War II. The paintings displayed came from a collection discovered and preserved by Honda's son, Ed Honda. Working with an ad hoc committee that included Bill Hoshijo and University of Hawai'i Professor Franklin Odo, the Hondas donated the collection to the Honolulu Academy of Art (HAA) (now the Honolulu Art Museum). With funding from the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Reflections of Internment opened at HAA on September 10, 1994, alongside a traveling exhibit, The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942–1945 , a broader survey of art from the concentration camps. An accompanying thirty-three page catalog included essays by Odo and Marcia Morse and color reproductions of nineteen of the artworks; it lists a total of fifty-five works. Honda's works displayed included images from his incarceration at the Camp McCoy , Wisconsin, interment camp and the concentration camps at Jerome , Arkansas, and Tule Lake , California. Though he was also held at the Sand Island camp in Honolulu, there are no depictions of that camp. Reflections of Internment closed after a six-week run and has not been mounted since.

Authored by Brian Niiya , Densho

Find in the Digital Library of Japanese American Incarceration

For More Information

Reflections of Internment: The Art of Hawaii's Hiroshi Honda . Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1994.

Muromoto, Wayne. "Hiroshi Honda: The Lost Chronicler of the Camps." Hawaii Herald , Feb. 19, 1988, 1, 10.

Last updated Jan. 30, 2024, 1:18 a.m..