Tickets to exile

Arts Center exhibits sculptures made from Japanese internees’ ID tags, photographs of 1941 America

Wendy Maruyama of San Diego created the Arkansas Arts Center’s exhibit of wraith-like paper sculptures representing Japanese-American citizens confined in camps during World War II. Called “The Tag Project,” the 10 sculptures are made from thousands of replica identification tags. “People can see how many Americans were affected during the war,” Maruyama says, but “few people knew about it.”
Wendy Maruyama of San Diego created the Arkansas Arts Center’s exhibit of wraith-like paper sculptures representing Japanese-American citizens confined in camps during World War II. Called “The Tag Project,” the 10 sculptures are made from thousands of replica identification tags. “People can see how many Americans were affected during the war,” Maruyama says, but “few people knew about it.”

— Artist Wendy Maruyama’s new exhibit at the Arkansas Arts Center is made of 120,000 paper tags - each with a person’s name on it, each a number, each the token of a life-changing story, many of these stories never told.

She created the show, “Wendy Maruyama: Executive Order 9066,” partly in remembrance of her family’s experience during the internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II.

Growing up, “I barely knew about it,” the artist says. “The survivors are just now starting to open up about it. For a long time, they felt like criminals.”

The show is paired with a related display, “Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass,” at the museum in Little Rock. Also in the Townsend Wolfe and Jeanette Edris Rockefeller galleries, “Relics of Rohwer: Gaman and the Art Of Perseverance” is a collection of art and belongings from the camp, on loan from the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock.

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Each of the 10 sculptures in Wendy Maruyama’s “Tag Project” represents a Japanese-American internment camp, including at Rohwer and Jerome in southeast Arkansas. These tags are for inmates at Rohwer.

All three shows pertain to a world in profound change after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941, and the United States entered into World War II.

Signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, Executive Order 9066 led to the confinement of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans, mostly from the West Coast, especially California.

The War Relocation Authority set up 10 isolated “relocation centers” to lock up displaced citizens on the chance they might spy for the enemy, Japan. Two of the camps were at Rohwer and Jerome in southeast Arkansas, and the rest in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming.

Each person in confinement had to wear a paper identification tag, Maruyama says. Few of the tags survived. But with “a lot of help,” she made a replica of each one.

She assembled the tags in 10 sculptures that she made to look like “ghostly figures,” one for each camp. Suspended, they stir in the slightest current, as if to bring the old names to life.

The exhibit opened in Maruyama’s home city, San Diego, and then Boston, but “one of my goals was to have the show in Arkansas,” she says, “because of the two camps.”

In previous showings, “several people have found their parents’ names,” she says. “One woman was crying - she must have been 75 - she found her father’s name, and it was like a visit with him.”

The project began when the artist saw a photo taken in one of the camps by Dorothea Lange, best known for her pictures that documented the Great Depression.

“I saw they had to wear these tags,” Maruyama says. “To me, these tags were the emblem of internment.” She found one tag intact to study in a museum.

By itself, any one tag might look like it came off a suitcase - just an ordinary, bent slip of light cardboard. But the artist saw, in thousands of tags, a way to show the huge effect of forced relocation.

The names were the surprisingly easy part, she says: “From the National Archives,” and, “you can find anything online.” The difficulty was so many tags to fill out.

“I traveled to different schools,” Maruyama says, giving talks and inviting students and other volunteers to lift a pen, and she set up a website to enlist helpers. (The project is done, but the site remains at tagproject.posterous.com.)

But none of the tags tells the artist’s story.

ON THE MOVE Maruyama’s account is a wood and photo collage, Furusato (Home), on the wall near the entrance. The wood symbolizes her training as a furniture maker. A teacher for 32 years, she specializes in furniture design at San Diego State University.

The photo on the left shows her grandfather, her mother as a child and her mother’s siblings, all smiles around the dinner table. The table has a crisp-looking cloth smoothed over it. Behind the table, a mirror reflects the scene - the home of a Japanese-American businessman in Los Angeles before Executive Order 9066.

To the right, a smaller photo shows a family on the move. They have stopped to pose like tourists in front of what appears to be a wood-frame barracks with a small window, but so far as Maruyama knows, they were not in camp.

Her grandmother was in fragile health, Maruyama says. Her grandfather feared this small woman could not survive internment, so he took a chance that was hardly better. The government allowed for “self-evacuation,” meaning the family picked up and moved east on their own. Rather than wait to be “relocated,” they left their home and import-export business on the chance of finding something, anything, better than assignment to a camp. Round and about, they arrived in Colorado.

Arkansas had a reputation for being “neither receptive nor supportive” to Japanese-Americans, according to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture. Colorado was said to be friendlier.

Maruyama imagines her grandparents probably would have been better off in camp. They couldn’t have lost more. But the move worked out in one way: Her mother met her father in Colorado, and she was born there.

If not for Executive Order 9066, she says, “I wouldn’t have been born.”

Maruyama supports her tag sculptures with several other pieces. A pile of suitcases represents how much people were allowed to take with them to camp - only as much as they could carry.

A wall display of bamboo fishing poles attests that most of the Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast prior to the war had been fishermen. Moving inland meant the end of everything they had known.

Theirs was dramatic change, but the war affected everyone.

PHOTO EVIDENCE

“Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass” takes a stark, black and-white look at America before and just after Pearl Harbor.

The two shows “complement one another,” curator Ann Wagner says: Weston’s photos offer a broad look at the nation in which Executive Order 9066 played out as a fragment of history.

The fine-art photographer and his wife and model, Charis Wilson, set off cross country in search of photos to illustrate a limited edition of Walt Whitman’s poetry collection, Leaves of Grass.

“They would stop in the evenings and read Leaves of Grass to each other,” Wagner says. But the marriage was faltering, and the road trip didn’t save it. Up for debate is whether Weston’s troubles, as much as the war, might have tinged even his most beautiful images with a feeling of melancholy.

Weston had declared from the start that his photos would not literally depict Whitman’s poems - nothing so obvious as a picture of grass. He had no big interest, either, in the signature event of Whitman’s time, the Civil War.

Knowing he could not please everyone, the photographer stated he “wouldn’t try to,” Wagner says.

Weston set himself a different challenge: to capture the tone of Whitman’s sensual writing. He meant to show how Whitman’s thoughts related to the America of Weston’s time, 1941 - a country on the verge of modern war. Weston, like most Americans, “very much knew that World War II was coming,” Wagner says, and that it would bring changes “no one could anticipate.”

The photographer lived in California, the state soon to be most affected by Executive Order 9066. But his travels had taken him to the opposite coast by December of 1941. In all, he crossed 24 states, and took hundreds of 8-by-10 images with his big camera that perched on a tripod. The camera’s unwieldiness required him to plan out every shot.

Weston did not stop in Arkansas, but he lingered in the South - New Orleans in particular, where the shadowed cemeteries and wrought iron fascinated him. He captured Nashville’s ornate and marble-clad Union Station (today a hotel), and saw the “quick locomotive as it departs, panting,” as Whitman wrote.

Weston’s camera appreciates New York’s lighted skyline, but he finds as much interest in the old shoes that ornament a farm in Ohio. He centers on a lawn chair in a scatter of dry leaves, a lone tree in the snow, the steam radiator that warmed the home of the poet William Carlos Williams.

In one of the few images that seem to comment directly on Whitman’s words, Weston frames an elderly couple in Burnet, Texas, outside Austin. “Did you know that old age may come at you,” Whitman wrote, with all the “grace, force and fascination” of youth.

WARNING FOR TODAY

Weston’s black-and-white photography enhances for Wagner the sense that “you’re seeing through his eyes.”

His thoughts: Not for the camera to say.

One impression a person might take from the show is that Weston traveled a nation of people like him, and like now - a nation in hope of small pleasures, but in dread of huge troubles. People are absent from most of his scenes, as if they have gone into hiding, or as if they have been taken away.

This is the warning Maruyama says she intends in Question of Loyalty, a sculpture built around the loyalty questionnaire that Japanese-American citizens were forced to sign in camp.Those who questioned why their loyalty was in doubt had to serve their time in stricter confinement, she says. Those who affirmed their absolute loyalty to the United States had to stay in the enclosure anyway.

In such a system, she would not be showing her work: She would be gone from sight.

The artist wants her sculptures to remind people that Executive Order 9066 “could happen again,” she says, and not just to Japanese-Americans - “to anybody.”

“Wendy Maruyama:Executive Order 9066,”

“Edward Weston: Leaves of Grass,” “Relics of Rohwer: Gaman and the Art of Perseverance”

Through April 21, Arkansas Arts Center, MacArthur Park, East Ninth and Commerce streets, Little Rock

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday

Info: arkarts.com or (501) 372-4000

Style, Pages 51 on 02/17/2013

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