S10 E1: Masters of Modern Design - The Art of the Japanese American Experience

[Music] we have this idyllic image of 1950s America with families buying homes and the suburbs there's jazz playing on the stereo technology is assuring in the new jet age but while that stereotype was true for some that particular American dream was not available to everyone not even some of those artists and designers whose work really visually define that era not only are all of these artworks immediately recognizable icons of post-war American art and design but their second generation Japanese American makers share a common bond beyond their ethnicity [Music] [Music] [Music] this program was made possible in part by a grant from an r/a foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs the California humanities and the California Arts Council really out in the country but the same gave you a river it was a very hard scrabble farming life for her she was argumentative so she often was working by herself in the field and she was very good at stringing up the string beans and that used to be my job every year year in yeah you spring the bottom you spring the middle and he's from the top and then you see a whole great big five acres she had the kind of energy that you really only see in immigrant children it's this relentless kind of labor that doesn't stop she didn't weed you know one weed at a time she had two hands going my parents both came from Japan they were both artists my mother was a floral designer and my father was a painter my father's family go back many many generations of painters in the Sendai area my father grew up in San Francisco he always talked about how his life was filled with art that he felt like he was an artist when he was growing up from a very early age he was really focused on being an architect he would say that his mother told him that as an artist painting was one thing but if you're an architect you're building art he went into architecture then he got a master's from MIT in 1930 [Music] he got a job with Anton and Raymond in Tokyo and worked alongside the Japanese and international architects who are working with mr. Raymond at the type so I met my relative especially my grandmother she had a beautiful farm house now outskirts of Tokyo and I lived entirely like Japanese he wanted to have an integrated process which is why he turned to furniture he said furniture is the same as architecture on a smaller scale and you can control it from beginning to end and it would be an integrated process perhaps because of my mixed nationality I always felt little uncertain as to where I belonged and I was always looking for some place where I would feel at home he always had a sense of civic purpose he was interested in sculpture because he was a civilization builder his time in New York in the early to mid 1930s was really marked by his active engagement in social activism and thinking with other artists about how art could be a force for social change in the 1930s he began to get very involved with the public works of art program he was a proposal and art from the early thirties on none of which were built so he was looking for opportunities to make work that was at the center of civic life he was born in 1921 in Waimea which is a little town on kawaii Hawaii was a really formative experience for him he had friends of a variety of ethnicities it was a pretty mixed village it was not all Japanese by any means he was sent to a boarding school in Honolulu and one of his teachers in high school taught an art class and he took it and did really well and this teacher really encouraged him he left I think when he was 18 got on a boat without knowing anybody and had no contacts at all in LA and just went he found a room I think in the boarding house in Little Tokyo I think Shannara that peeled and because it was the most like hands-on as an art school of all the ones he visited it gave him at that time a kind of purpose in life it was like this could lead somewhere you know of course that was interrupted by the war yesterday December 7 1941 they date which will live in infamy we were in the field sorry I know it's my eleven o'clock when we could come in and got the news two FBI men came to pick our Father we are sure for him and he went off I didn't hear from him for many years [Music] pressure from West Coast political and business leaders the War Department and the Army eventually convinced President Roosevelt to sign executive order 9066 On February 19 1942 which authorized the War Department to move all japanese-americans from the West Coast states so there was about a hundred and ten thousand men women and children who were forcibly removed from their homes from these areas we lost farm equipment the horses and we had nothing half that they were sent to the Santa Anita racetrack and there were horse stalls that were whitewashed and that's what the family lived him nothing was connected laundry and started all that there's no privacy Ruth was inclined to find the good in the grimmest of situations but something kind of magical did happen in Santa Anita three men arrived from Disney Studios Tom Okamoto Chrissy she and James Tanaka and they had been successful young animators on animated full length features and they all three came to teach I stayed with Tom and he taught us to grow she just loved drawing with them and being taught by professional artists after Santa Anita my mother and her family are shipped to roar in McGee Arkansas Mabel Rose Jamison who was the art teacher would take some of the kids outside the camp to sketch and to draw we did like the sumo wrestlers and we did landscape she illustrated the camp yearbook they didn't have photographs so my mother did caricatures of classmates so she made the best of it it kind of set the stage for her belief of that art saved us during the internment she would say that often art saved us my father was a freshman at Cal in architecture when Pearl Harbor happened you know being a student in college you didn't think about these things very much until then it dawned on my father that maybe I should try to get out of California if you got a acceptance by any college outside of the three states on the west coast they might release you I sent a request to Washington University in st. Louis they said that they would accept me and the night before my family was to be sent to camp I left Berkeley on a train to st. Louis [Music] my father was a professor at the University California in Berkeley when he got to these camp my father immediately set up schools for the young children my younger sister and I went out and painted every day and we would go to the art school and watch professor Obata a gunman straight Obata said that education was as as important as food to the individual and for him our education in particular would really help you know rise above your circumstances everybody was painting in all media but I loved watercolors [Music] Tamm Fran was the temporary camp and so eventually by September all 8,000 internees were then going to be transported by train to the desert of Utah which was the so called permanent camp there were ten permanent camps that were assembled to hold japanese-americans most of them were in very isolated areas of the United States the irony was I was a free man in st. Louis and I was allowed at Christmas time to visit them while they were incarcerated we hadn't seen each other for months of course he was so amazed to see how brown they were they were living the outdoor life really and they thought he looked so pale because he was the studious architecture student so I went to camp lived with my family in their small room for two weeks and then came out a free person just really a strange set of circumstances you grow up pretty quickly when you're on your own and you're the only one who's not in camp everyone else in your family is so I think you become pretty serious about who you are and what you need to do we were put into concentration camps about which most Americans didn't know anything [Music] the buildings were sort of done but they weren't completed and dad and this Japanese carpenter were given the task of trying to make the barracks more livable than they were Gentile he Kagawa whole trained as a Japanese carpenter in Japan and they worked alongside each other and had learned from him he considers this period of time while he was at Minidoka as a period of apprenticeship where he really learned how to work with wood by hand I think that was the beginning of learning how to improvise with found materials there was something called bitter brush key and Quintero would go and gather pieces together they're very small and tortured and but very interesting forms and many of them apparently collected this kind of wood and made sculptural objects out of them it was an invaluable experience for my father [Music] Noguchi was the only voluntary internee at the Poston camp he realized that he was a nice a japanese-american whereas up until then he was an avant-garde artist traveling morally in Europe and New York very little to do with the same world officials in DC promised Noguchi that he would be able to come to Poston that he would be able to start an art program that he would have materials he would have supplies he would have space he had this plan for a public swath of services that included parks and gardens and a proper Cemetery and a miniature golf course and baseball you know everything that you would expect to have in a great American city he really thought that good design could fix anything initially all of the planning was happening in the Bureau of Indian Affairs by the time the internment camps were actually founded they ended up in the War Department so the War Department chose to execute them as prison camps he arrived thinking that he was going to be able to build an art program and when he realized quite quickly within the first several weeks that the program might not have the kind of materials or facility is that he had envisioned he became very quickly disillusioned he realized he shared absolutely nothing in common with the Issei there was no community there for him and he realized that he'd parachuted into a world of alienation and that he was ironically totally alienated from it you know he saw avant-garde internationally known most of the nice days were very conventional you know and they didn't understand these some were coming from another whole other world so I don't think he got along very well but for Nisei and camp and I believe that he found himself to be at the center of great ire for seeming to be working with the camp administration he's the only one in the entire camp of 18,000 people with his own space he had his own apartment and he was accused of being a collaborator he realized he couldn't really do much and so he wanted to leave the whole experience was incredibly disillusioning for him this is the Prairie where the Shoshones live the crows are upper homes but out in that plane where tumbleweeds just rolled they built a camp with Bob why around him that hell 10,000 people the emotional pole was like really significant for everybody but it wasn't like he lost his home it wasn't like he lost his business it wasn't like you know there are a lot of things he did not lose at heart mountain he seems to have had some position of responsibility so he became the the designer of the newspaper the hard mountain Sentinel there's a contour outline drawing of the profile of the mountain that he did I guess that was a start I guess that was his first professional job in 1943 the US Army realized that the war effort was going poorly in Europe and that they needed literally more men to go and fight so they came up with the idea of creating a segregated unit of japanese-american soldiers everyone is aware of the fact that it's hypocritical and immoral but the question is what do you do about it and he volunteered to join the army two four four two he did this basic training in Mississippi I was in training for four months not enough time really to learn anything or come back he also talked about going to a restaurant having to use the restroom and he was showing out the back and there was one side was for coloreds and one side was for white people and he didn't know what to do so he basically went in between the two and just peed on the sidewalk they would go on to become the most highly decorated unit of their size and American military history for their length of service unfortunately the reason why they were so highly decorated is because so many of them were awarded the Purple Heart and that's the middle of course that you receive when you are either wounded or killed Nisei soldiers during World War two understood that loyalty needed to be demonstrated in blood the 442 was a place that enabled japanese-americans to reclaim some of their legitimacy due to their sacrifice it's worth noting that the blacks that served in the military were not able to kind of use that to kind of reclaim something when they returned so there were some paradoxes which were not lost on him [Music] buthe in her heart wanted to be an artist I would advise to become a teacher so I thought I would just go to Teachers College no hockey Teachers College it was still the idea of do something sensible be responsible you should have a secure career of course all of the interned youth had to go to school in the heartland in the Midwest and stay away from the coast because the war was still on when I was ready to practice teach they wouldn't let me because they were worried about my safety the administration told her they could not assign her to student teaching and that she would have to leave without her degree because of racism because of bias so I went to Blackman she had no longer any barriers between her desire to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a working artist Black Mountain College was located just outside of Asheville North Carolina it became the place for the most progressive art teaching in the world black mountain becomes this incredibly rich intellectual community bringing in artists of all different backgrounds that you have people like us have enemy elbows coming in refugees from Europe people like Jacob Lawrence Bucky forward de Koning Merce Cunningham and John Cage and these people who became very prominent in American art Ruth actually took Josef Albers for three years took the same design course for three years because it was different every single year it was practically a religious experience for her she was given the permission to kind of be herself in a very different way after the summer of 47 she and her older sister Chiyo were invited to go on the Quaker sponsored educational exchange down in Mexico there was a market and my mother saw them making baskets for eggs and she asked him to teach her how to do it when she came back to Black Mountain College she was making these mad little baskets out of wire at some point one of her friends says what happens if you close it up and then once you closed it up it became a suspended object as opposed to a very functional basket one thing that she said about it was that it was like drawing in space it was like drawing in three dimensions and that was the kind of link with her training by Albers it was this transparent form and it was made with this very simple repetitive kind of like stringing those green meat yeah it's funny because most people will just assume her work is Asian and then it's exciting to be able to point out that no her work is very multicultural she was amazing at being able to take all of these influences and combine them into one single statement in college was this unique little place in the world where you could be an interracial couple and nobody would have a problem with that I guess it was 49 the anti-miscegenation law was overturned my mother came out to California from Black Mountain and they got married he knew that she had to keep doing her work Josef Albers had said never let her stop working and he didn't he really took it to heart she really was an artist lived slept dreamt art gillo bata graduated from the architecture school at Washington University in st. Louis and then he went to graduate school at Cranbrook outside Detroit an art and design school run by Eliel Saarinen the finnish architect sarin and said when you start thinking about a building you first think about a chair you know what's what's this experience of this place gonna be for the people who are you gonna use the building almost drafted after graduate school and was sent up to the Aleutian Islands dan said that all the other soldiers there had pictures of like Betty Grable on their walls and my dad had a poster of a Frank Lloyd Wright building so he was always considered a little odd and at the camp but I think he couldn't wait to get out and back into the world of being a professional architect well I met my first wife but she was a weaver studying at Cranbrook while I was studying architecture when yo bata got a job in Chicago his wife made JAL chance rented an apartment for them because there was a chance they would be denied a lease because he was japanese-american my father was recruited by menorah yamasaki who had a firm in Detroit and was a fairly famous architect at the time yamazaki and Obata built the Lambert Airport in st. Louis and it was really the first glamorous modern airport that evoked the engineering and ingenuity of jet travel while you were still on the ground when it opened architectural forum called it the Grand Central of the air Minoru Yamasaki got very ill with ulcers and he wanted to close st. Louis and so Hellmuth and Kassebaum and I decided to split with the AMA and started hok my dad was able to focus completely on design he could do exactly what he loved to do I was trying to set up my office and I was working you know 60 70 hours a week many of Obata and hok s most spectacular structures are in st. Louis one of my favorites is the Priory chapel it's made of 20 parabolic concrete arches arranged like flower petals and then in three tiers so you just feel like you're embraced by circles and light within the space those kind of day lit spectacular public spaces are a through-line in all of OU Bottas work very early in our career we try to diversify our practice that was the basis of hok was that we became a highly diversified firm and we also brought in interior designers and planners landscape architects graphic people to bring a whole integrated design practice and so with those two elements we kept expanding hok really became one of the largest global architectural firms with offices all over the world [Music] we actually left camp in 1943 much earlier than most of our relatives did and came to Bucks County fortunately the man I used to work for in Japan returned to this country and bought a farm just outside of New Hope in Bucks County and he and his wife invited us to come out here and work on a farm so we did just anyplace to get away from the camps dad was put to work as a chicken farmer he wasn't allowed to work on Raymond's projects because he was doing some government work and then in 1945 dad went on on his own he found an abandoned cottage down the road here and set up his shop in the garage and found the owner of the property and asked him if he could have three acres of land in exchange for labor we lived in an old army tent while dad built the shop first and then he built the house the War Relocation Authority took photos of the Nakashima family and in the photos you can see them arranged around the stone fireplace in a traditional American farmhouse I do remember being at the old house when they were taking the pictures and you know I was just three years old you know sit on the bench and use that tools oh I just did what I was told and mom had me all dressed up in my best dress and put ribbons in my hair and stuff so you know everybody was smiling and happy they were trying to convince the public that the incarceration didn't hurt us at all and we were still very happy and successful so forth so that's the story that those photos tell when he first opened his workshop I don't think he could afford to buy really good lumber rather than bemoaning the fact that he couldn't afford to buy the really good lumber he improvised with it I think was probably mostly out of economic necessity that he started making furniture that he's famous for now and dad said in the beginning people didn't quite understand what he was doing and he said after they got it he said they would pay extra for the holes and the cracks and the butterflies he would never want to make furniture out of anything but wood and he said that's probably because of his Japanese heritage every object in nature is sacred and should be respected as such I feel that there's a spirit in - that's very deep and I'm somewhat were good in order to produce a fine piece of furniture the spirit of a tree lives on and I can give it a second life I think working with the natural edges that probably stem from having been in camp and having to work with whatever found materials there were his designs became less rectilinear I think after the camp experience and more free he was fortunate because of the post-war cultural flow that was happening the Zen aspect of Japanese design and emptiness concepts on in Japanese philosophy were really important to the development of modern design not only in Japan but in the Western world as well he also worked in the early days with Knoll studios through that Knoll connection his name went a lot further than it would have gone otherwise he most famously was commissioned by a Nelson Rockefeller to make furniture for many of his residences Nakashima x' furniture really shows the fusion of different cultures that was happening in modern design at the time he'd learned traditional Japanese carpentry and camp he was living in Pennsylvania surrounded by all of this classic American furniture like Windsor chairs and then he goes out into the forest and brings back that wildness and puts all three of these elements together his chairs particularly are almost early American vernacular so there are certainly early American influences as well as probably as European influences in his work you could almost call it a great example of a Japanese American creative form the experience of postin for Noguchi was intense and followed him for the rest of his life no question he came out of the camp very depressed but he was able to get a leave of absence or furlough and he never returns so he's been AWOL ever since then he was under surveillance during this period Noguchi was part of a group of artists and writers who had often been under surveillance his mailman was in fact an informant for the FBI and that's something that really affected him greatly during this period he wanted to shape the curve of an abstract form but the whole time he was doing it it felt wrong that depression would build and then manifest itself really ultimately in a desire to stop making discrete things and find a way to reconnect sculpture with society in a way that could make his life's work worthwhile he was working in his studio in Greenwich Village and he began to make sculptures that seemed to engage directly with the texture of the desert landscape at the same time a work such as this tortured earth was a much more over an explicit engagement with the earth as a kind of victim as a traumatized face he made a beautiful piece that feels like it's sort of barely held together and will blow away with the slightest breeze abstraction for Noguchi enabled him to speak about the experience and the trauma of the war in ways that couldn't be pinned down and labeled he began to make sculptures that could be taken down and put back up in ways that mimicked the relocation process itself we call them the interlocking sculptures and they're ones that he made out of flat sheet materials mostly stone as they can be collapsed they can be bundled up they can be thrown over the shoulder you know that idea again that internees were only allowed what they could carry and in some ways these are the perfect interment sculptures and there's a really interesting example of this that is the table design that he made in 1944 1945 I think that this table is a kind of mass cultural design that takes the language of relocation and refugee movement around the world and puts it into an actual object of design throughout his career Noguchi had to negotiate the fact that art critics tended to describe his work as being somehow essentially Japanese even those who admired him often tended to also undercut him there was always an undercurrent of racism oriental art was effeminate and a feat and those are terms that were used to describe any bujji's work as well Noguchi planet withdrew himself from that dealer critic system that's the moment where he really decided to leave New York leave the United States and he started traveling around the world and was making an effort to look at examples where sculpture was at the center of civilization Osamu would always go to the source I mean by going through those primitive sources you got closer to reality or the origin of man striving for art or expressing in our and he developed an idea he called it the true development of old traditions he viewed old technology as every bit as worthwhile as new technology and was curious about how to make it work for now the iqari sculptures that he created were really important to the idea of the designer and the architect as someone who could impact the lives of everyday people the objects were affordable they were portable they cast beautiful light and could be used as sculptures as well as functional objects those Akari lights also became one of the most visible ways that he was understood within the United States as being an innovative designer Neel Fujita went back to Los Angeles to re-enroll in art school so we went back to Sonora at this time he went back on the GI Bill he talked about it that's a really really exciting time for him plus he met his wife so that was pretty important to one of his mentor's suggested that he meets some people out east to consider like jobs in 1953 Neal Fujita won the gold medal from the New York art directors Club for an ad he'd design for The Container Corporation of America which was then one of the country's leading patrons of graphic design they gave awards to the highest level of typography and imagery and Fujita fit in to that category just a few years after he'd been discharged from the Army Fujita had already reached the top echelon of graphic design in America we got a call from William golden at Columbia saying would you be interested to come to New York to start a graphic design department at Columbia Records bill golden offered him this job but he said look if you take this job you're gonna be taking jobs away from other people that have worked with us for years you're gonna be called like a champ you're gonna be called a nip you're gonna be called all sorts of things it's not gonna be good and you know my father was like a beanie being called all sorts of stuff in LA and you know after Pearl Harbor so you know he was totally on board with it [Music] well he did covers for Dave Brubeck he did covers for Miles Davis Horace silver Duke Ellington he did covers for a pretty wide range of jazz artists he represents the introduction of abstraction to graphic design jazz being an improvisational form abstraction being improvisational for the most part we're in sync it's got a kind of rhythm kind of visual bounce to it that's typical of what he was capable of doing and it's a really interesting lively design I think jazz was was something that represented freedom for him as an art director Fujita worked with a lot of artists who were renowned or on the verge of becoming renowned Andy Warhol was an illustrator Ben Shawn was an illustrator Milton Glaser was an illustrator worried the Kaurava was a photographer Columbia Records did something that nobody else was doing they didn't put just a picture of somebody on a cover they gave you a work of art you made a point of trying to hire people that represented like a diverse group he hired blacks he hired women and for him America was really composed of all of these different people representing different cultures and races and coming from different places well in order to explain where Fujita stood in the pop culture firmament you had to understand that record albums were on the highest level of popular culture he made works of art that spoke of the sound and texture and love of the people who were making that music he felt what they were doing put it on a canvas not only was he a major designer of album covers but he was a major designer of book cover still there's a reason he was such a success because his works communicated and people appreciated them when he did Truman Capote's in cold blood Capote said that this isn't right the blood is too red it's too fresh so my father changed the color to kind of like a purplish and put like this black border around the cover to indicate something more fewn aerial and used to look Apple you really loved that in those days people actually use quill pens and brushes and dyes and they actually all that lettering they did by hand so what he did the godfather that was done by hand when they we were driving down Times Square and the movie was about to come out and they were putting up this billboard and my father thought to himself you know I owned this image so he actually got them to stop work until they came to like some kind of financial arrangement to have reached that point where you can say I did an icon that's an achievement I think his work in and of itself is an achievement [Music] she did have some great successes in New York and very very young artists fresh from Black Mountain she had several gallery shows where some very famous collectors bought her work and Nelson Rockefeller family were early collectors [Music] so while she was commercially being accepted critically it was a sort of a mess you know and he reads some of the reviews of her work from 1954 and 56 you see that she's being called a housewife the work is decorative the work wasn't seen for what it was at that time for me the beauty in the magic is that she does take this base metal a steel wire or a copper wire and she transforms it into something that is shimmering mesh after all wire had been an instrument of her confinement and she transforms it into a thing of beauty and for me that's the magic I think people once they see the work they realize how beautiful it is but then if they go even deeper they realize what an amazing person she was she would speak up when things weren't right and she got involved in politics and the public schools and that whole black mountain-- experience and the internment who really shaped how she felt about artisan schools and that art could be a great educational tool she got foundation grants and federal grants and finally became a line item on the San Francisco Unified School District budget and thousands of children were benefited by these programs sometimes the most interesting artists aren't the heroic male abstract expressionist painters but someone like Ruth asawa who does her work at home surrounded by her children with the simplest materials and still was able to make something amazing I think now we see her ability to weave her life and her art work together as one of her great strengths I think it was an advantage to be japanese-american in his profession because you know he had a different perspective you know he he had this love of Japanese design and art and the the focus on nature and I think you know the way he talked about architecture was it was different than how other people talk and I think it was directly because of his heritage and how he grew up in this family of artists I mean he's one of the few Nisei who did not deny his Japanese heritage he loved Japan he never denied it [Music] when he passed away not that one I gonna do with all these orders what am I gonna do with these men in the shop you know they need jobs what am I gonna do with that huge woodpile I've been working with him professionally since 1970 I had trained with him it dawned on me during the process that this is my father's legacy so we got to keep going [Music] Noguchi was extremely fortunate to execute some really important projects around the world [Music] perhaps the designs he made for Poston for this transformation of the landscape finally may have come to fruition in a much later project that he did called California scenario that the meandering stream through a kind of desert like environment to my mind echoes the early plans at Poston [Music] for him there were no boundaries the applied arts and the Fine Arts he was your serratus and creating and working with space he took everything that should have been a handicap and made it into the core of what made him the powerful successful person that he was he's such a role model or a more engaged multicultural multiracial complicated world I feel like his alliances weren't for people who had suffered under oppressive regimes when Emmett Till died in reference to the brutal murder of a young black boy in the South where he was physically brutalized by two men and famously his mother left the coffin open that his funeral so people could see how savagely he was beaten it was one of the things that inaugurated the civil rights movement in the 1960s the Emmett Till peony that my father made was the way a kind of very humanist painting that was a kind of protest against what had happened but also spoke to a kind of hope that might emerge out of the protest so the 1960s is a time of great change in our nation and we have the civil rights movement in full bloom we have the anti-war movement we have the women's movement and we have the ethnic studies movement all going on at the same time sansei which is my generation the third generation Americans of Japanese descent even though we were born and raised as Americans we weren't seen or treated as such my parents never spoke about the camp experience which i think is typical of the Nisei and the Issei who were put into camps I mean there was a very strong sense of shame and Japanese sociology when I was in high school I did a paper on the internment camp and in the course of my interview with my parents they said that this was the first time that they had ever talked about the camp experience to anybody sometimes somebody would talk about camp and I would think it was like summer camp and it wasn't until I was probably you know 12 or 13 did I really understand what had happened the thing that kept coming up was that expression she caught the good eye it can't be helped couldn't be helped we did the best we could not talking about the internment was internalized in Japanese American families but also in mainstream American culture I don't think that the government much less citizens wanted to look at itself and think about what it had done they held these things in for so long that when the opportunity came to talk about their experiences they really came forth [Music] and as powerful as that testimony was I would submit to you that the more powerful testimony actually occurred in people's homes around their coffee tables and around their dining-room tables as a sansei would say to their niece say parents and he say grandparents tell us what happened tell us what really went down during that time on August 10th 1988 President Reagan signed the civil liberties Act of 1988 granting an apology $20,000 of individual monetary reparations and creating a trust fund of 50 million dollars for the japanese-american community to share the story as part of the redress movement a number of the camp sites became national and state historic landmarks and the artists were asked to make works explicitly about the japanese-american experience Noguchi's sculpture called to the esa in LA's little tokyo was lightly carved from two massive boulders that were imported from Japan unlike his interlocking sculptures that were meant to be portable when Iguchi was asked about the form of this work he described it as being an antidote to impermanence in 1999 Obata was asked to design a permanent home for the Japanese American National Museum on a historic site in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles next door to the site was a Buddhist temple that had been used to process internees in 1942 I think that was what was so important about being able to design this building that to be able to tell those stories so that all Americans remember what happened to the japanese-americans and how that should never happen again unfortunately this whole question of prejudice in our society against minorities continues to erupt prejudice is just a stupid thing and it has to be wiped out if the world is going to become one a one side of the memorial it's before the war mostly autobiographical about her childhood and then the other side is the camps and life during the war she read a lot about the internment in a way that she hadn't read before I think she wanted to try and do a broader story than definitely her own I don't wanted to be seen as a memorial to Betty happenes it can happen to anybody if you don't pay attention this can happen to you too in truth all of these artists had been living and working with their camp experience since the 1940s where they lived the materials they used the forms that they made all of those decisions came as a result of what had happened to them during the war and those decisions actually changed the face of American culture even though these artists were not considered Americans just a decade before the camp experience could have crushed him but it didn't I think it was it was it was traumatic the question is what do you do with it [Music] it taught me not to be afraid of the unknown the unknown is really the thing that frees you into the universe I think [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] this program was made possible in part by a grant from an r/a foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs the California humanities in the California Arts Council

Channel: KCET

Views: 54,234

Rating: 4.9792924 out of 5

Keywords: kcet, southern california, Artbound, art, culture, Japanese-American, Japanese, Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi, S. Neil Fujita, Gyo Obata, WWII, incarceration, internment

Id: CpfhVmDNuho

Length: 56min 6sec (3366 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019