Works of interned artist now have home, son says

Frank Sata (left) speaks of his father’s art as a historical record of their time in a World War II internment camp in Arkansas during an event Wednesday at the Ron Robinson Theater. David Stricklin (right), manager of the Butler Center, moderates the event.
Frank Sata (left) speaks of his father’s art as a historical record of their time in a World War II internment camp in Arkansas during an event Wednesday at the Ron Robinson Theater. David Stricklin (right), manager of the Butler Center, moderates the event.

Though the barracks are gray and still, the sky above them is on fire.

From the surface of a canvas, a vibrant sunset draws the eye up from the somber image of Jerome Relocation Center, a World War II Japanese-American internment camp in southeast Arkansas. The sunset was painted 70 years ago by J.T. Sata during his confinement but now has an audience far removed from the camp's grounds: gallery visitors at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock.

Sata's painting is part of a Butler Center exhibit of artworks by internees at Arkansas' two WWII-era camps: Jerome in Drew and Chicot counties and Rohwer Relocation Camp in Desha County.

On Wednesday, Sata's son, Frank Sata, spoke at a Butler Center and Clinton School of Public Service lecture, recalling his family's internment and how his father's creativity inspired his own career as an architect.

Frank Sata has given the center many of his father's oil paintings and charcoal drawings for its permanent collection.

"I've been looking for over 20 years for a place to deposit these drawings that my father made in camp," Sata said during his lecture. "It reminds me of, not the good times, but how he saw the world and perhaps what he brought in his roots from Japan."

Sata was born in Southern California in 1933, just two weeks after Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. His parents gave him the first name "Franklin" in honor of the president. Nine years later, Roosevelt would sign Executive Order 9066, which allowed for the creation of internment camps and uprooted the Sata family.

Throughout his lecture, Sata detailed the strain that internment put on his parents. En route to Jerome, the family was placed briefly at Santa Anita Park, a horse-racing track in Arcadia, Calif.

"I recall vividly the smell of horse and stable," he said, adding that he remembers stuffing a mattress to sleep on with hay on the floor. "We slept side by side and I was in the middle and we had a mosquito net. ... At that age, 8 or 9, you're comfortable to be part of the family and some of the pains are not with you in the same way."

During the war, Jerome and Rohwer held 16,000 Japanese-Americans. On more than 10,000 acres, 8,500 people were interned at Jerome at its peak, a third of them children, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.

Butler Center Manager David Stricklin, who moderated the question-and-answer portion of Sata's lecture, spoke about the perseverance of Jerome's internees.

"They were essentially civilian prisoners of war in their own country," Stricklin said. "And the way they expressed their feelings about that experience and about the United States through their art, it is truly extraordinary."

Sata's father, an avid photographer in California, began painting while at the camp, putting on canvas sun-lit trees from the forest that surrounded the camp and barracks covered by snow during a bitterly cold Arkansas winter. In 1942, when Jerome was converted to a German prisoner-of-war camp and the family was sent to Gila, Ariz., his landscapes changed to desert spotted with cacti.

Sata said that after his family was released from the camps, his father did not return to the photography he had once loved.

"In fact, I bought him a projector at one time," he said, "but he refused to use it. So, we never talked about it since he didn't want to do it."

Sera Streiff-Vena and Ann Owen of Little Rock attended Wednesday's lecture. Streiff-Vena said she was surprised to find how close to home Sata's message hit.

She recalled a story her late mother told her about witnessing a train full of Japanese-Americans stop in North Little Rock during the war. Streiff-Vena said her mother's church hosted a game night for the children in the group.

"She said, 'So we played games with them, we brought cakes, and as we left there were locked gates, and the kids peeked out of them,'" Streiff-Vena related. "And she said, 'I still remember their faces. It was so confusing because we didn't know what was going on.' We were all so stunned because we knew, 'Oh, my God, those were the internees.'"

After the war, Frank Sata bounced between schools and the military, eventually studying architecture at the University of Southern California on the GI Bill. While there, he developed an interest in Frank Lloyd Wright, who was himself inspired by Japanese architecture.

Sata said much of his life has focused on rebuilding the cultural roots disrupted by internment, a process helped by discovering his own artistic passion.

"As Americans, we pride ourselves on our independent thinking and what we think freedom means," he told the audience. "I have always likened [Wright] as that type of man. He defined in one of his lectures the meaning of democracy as: the right of the common man to be uncommon and as the right to be yourself. I think we can better understand the world only after we better understand ourselves."

Metro on 08/07/2014

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