Relocations and Revisions: The Japanese-American Internment Reconsidered (exhibition)

Exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art featuring work inspired by the wartime expulsion and incarceration by contemporary Japanese American artists, most of whom were too young to experience the concentration camps firsthand. Opening on May 10, 1992, Relocations and Revisions also included a program of videos and well as a catalog with both print and video components.

The exhibition included the works of ten artists, working in a wide variety of media, most of whom were Sansei . Among them were Kristine Yuki Aono, Matthew W. Fukuda, Margaret Honda, Dorothy Imagire Tom Nakashima, Roger Shimomura , Rea Tajiri, Qris Yamashita, and brothers Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. Many of the artists repurpose archival material in their work, whether family documents and photographs or government imagery of the camps, and with the exception of the works by sculptor Honda and painter Nakashima, all of the works refer explicitly to the incarceration.

Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight called the show "engaging" and "a generous, provocative show." [1] It was one of several exhibitions that commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Japanese American incarceration and one of two that centered on artistic expression. [2] Relocations and Revisions was a key event in establishing a framework for subsequent Sansei artistic exploration of the incarceration.

Authored by Brian Niiya , Densho

For More Information

Gamblin, Noriko. Relocations and Revisions: The Japanese-American Internment Reconsidered, May 10–July 5, 1992 . Long Beach, Calif.: Long Beach Museum of Art, 1992.

Knight, Christopher. "'Relocations' in Long Beach a Generous, Provocative Show." Los Angeles Times , May 21, 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-21/entertainment/ca-128_1_long-beach .

Kuramitsu, Kristine C. "Internment and Identity in Japanese American Art." American Quarterly 47.4 (Dec 1995): 619-58.

Footnotes

  1. Christopher Knight, "'Relocations' in Long Beach a Generous, Provocative Show," Los Angeles Times , May 21, 1992, accessed on November 7, 2013 at http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-21/entertainment/ca-128_1_long-beach .
  2. The other, which was produced by the Japanese American National Museum and opened later that fall at UCLA's Wight Art Gallery, was The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942–1945 , a complimentary exhibition that featured work by Japanese American artists created in the concentration camps.

Last updated July 10, 2017, 9:41 p.m..