There is something that architect Gyo Obata, furniture designer George Nakashima, graphic artist S. Neil Fujita and artists Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi have in common – they represent second-generation Japanese American creatives, but they also experienced life in the Japanese internment camps in America. Their stories are told in the documentary "Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience", directed by Akira Boch, on today at the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF: NY) at New York's Cinépolis Chelsea.
In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066, a directive that authorized the internment of Japanese citizens and American citizens of Japanese heritage living on the west coast, dramatically changing the lives of thousands of people. Gyo Obata, George Nakashima, S. Neil Fujita, Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi lived this trauma, but the camp experience, the discrimination and hardships they went through, didn't crush them as they had art and design on their side. Boch's documentary recounts their lives and experiences via archival footage and with interviews with their children, with historians and museum curators.
Ruth Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, California, and was interned with her family first at the Santa Anita racetrack and then at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.
During her internment Asawa spent her time drawing and, after getting an ID card from the War Relocation Authority, she was allowed to travel to Milwaukee where she attended college. No school in Wisconsin would hire someone who was Japanese even at the end of the war, so she could not complete her fourth college year that was supposed to be devoted to practice teaching.
She therefore enrolled in the Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura La Esmeralda in Mexico City and at the University of Mexico. Here she met Clara Porset, an innovative furniture designer from Cuba who had been at Black Mountain College where Asawa decided to move to pursue further studies in art. From 1946 to 1949, Asawa studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College where she started using common materials and experimenting with wire.
In 1959 Asawa married architect Albert Lanier and in the following decade she started making crocheted industrial wire sculptures employing a technique she learnt in 1947 while in Toluca, Mexico, where villagers made egg baskets from galvanized wire.
Asawa created a series of spheres, cones and elongated structures that she suspended in space. More experiments followed in the '60s and the artist moved from the geometrical shapes she found in nature to ethereal structures, creating large wall-mounted pieces inspired by the internal structure of a desert plant.
Artist Isamu Noguchi voluntarily entered the Poston War Relocation Center, in the Arizona Desert, despite being exempt from internment as a resident of New York.
Noguchi, who was also chairman of The Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy and a national spokesperson for the Japanese-American community, took this decision as he felt he could be a positive influence for the forcibly displaced community of Japanese Americans. He hoped indeed it would have been possible for him to turn the camp into a more human environment, adding a park and recreational area, baseball fields, swimming pools, and a design for a cemetery. He soon became disillusioned as he was never supported by the Poston officials, the War Relocation Authority, or the War Department, and his plans were never put into practice.
While at the camp Noguchi's works transformed, going from figurative to modernist: at Poston, the artist started working with new materials, including wood. Disillussioned and depressed, Noguchi managed to get out of the camp seven months later. Among the artworks that he created after the camp, Noguchi's intelocking collapsible sculptures were the most striking as they turned into symbols of the experience of the camp. Internees were indeed allowed only what they could carry, and his collapsible artworks and table hint at moving and relocation.
George Katsutoshi Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington, and studied architecture, earning a master's degree in architecture from M.I.T. He then travelled to Europe and Japan. He returned to American in 1940 and was interned in Camp Minidoka in Hunt, Idaho. At the camp he met Gentaro Hikogawa, who taught him traditional Japanese carpentry.
Released from the camp in 1943, he was invited by Antonin Raymond to live on his farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. At the camp Nakashima had improvised with the wood he could find; in New Hope he continued his exploration of the organic expressiveness of wood, hoping to preserve through furniture the beauty of nature and give a second life to trees. He often chose boards with knots and burls and fixed cracks with his trademark butterfly joints, highlighting the natural imperfections.
Nakashima also designed furniture lines for companies such as Knoll and accepted private commissions (Nelson Rockefeller was among his clients). Since he died in 1990, his legacy continues through his company, now guided by his daughter Mira, who takes the director behind the doors of the family business to show some of Nakashima's most iconic designs, a perfect synthesis of Japanese and American forms. Nakashima is indeed seen as a designer-craftsman whose work is a fusion of cultures – traditional Japanese carpentry, life in Pennsylvania, and the wilderness of the forest surrounding his workshop.
Gyo Obata (born in 1923), found himself in a different situation from that of his parents, painter Chiura Obata and floral designer Haruko Obata. His family was interned in California, but, as they prepared to leave, Obata received a letter saying he'd been admitted to the architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis, the only university in the United States that accepted Japanese nationals at that time. So he boarded the train the night before his family was moved into camp. While studying he went to visit them, and realised that his condition was peculiar and awkward: he was a free man, his parents were interned.
Graduating in 1945, he served in the U.S. Army and then worked as an architect in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) from 1947 to 1951. He founded with George Hellmuth and George Kassabaum St. Louis-based HOK.
The architectural firm thrived, designing (among the other buildings) the Saint Louis Science Center's James S. McDonnell Planetarium, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, the Independence Temple of the Community of Christ Church and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
Born in Waimea, Hawaii to Japanese immigrants, Sadamitsu "S. Neil" Fujita (1921 - 2010) was enrolled in Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California, when World War II broke out. He was relocated to the Pomona Assembly Center outside Los Angeles and later to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1943, and served in an anti-tank unit, a segregated regiment of Japanese American volunteers and draftees that became the most decorated unit in the war. After the conflict, he returned to Los Angeles, finished his studies and joined Philadelphia ad agency N. W. Ayer & Son, creating bold avant-garde works. He was offered in 1954 the position of director of design and packaging at Columbia Records in New York.
Fujita brought forward the legacy of the label's renowned designer Alex Steinweiss: he became the first graphic designer to collaborate with painters, photographers and illustrators, creating innovative and iconic designs. Album covers were on the highest level of popular culture at the time, they were considered as pop culture canvases, and Fujita became known for a special synergy between his art and music. He often used his own modernist paintings on the covers of jazz albums and the bright geometric abstract images perfectly conveyed the mood of the music, as proved by the covers of Dave Brubeck's "Time Out" and Charles Mingus's "Mingus Ah Um". His graphic artworks and jazz music both came to symbolise freeedom.
Later on, he designed book covers for Mario Puzo's The Godfather (Fujita's extrended G and puppeteer hand attached to the word "Godfather" became iconic and his graphic design was also used for the film poster) and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (Fujita's son recounts in the documentary how Capote didn't like the bright red colour of the drop of blood on the original cover as that seemed to be too fresh while the crime was old, so his father opted for a dark burgundy).
Apart from having lived the experience of the Japanese internment camps in America, Gyo Obata, George Nakashima, S. Neil Fujita, Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi also share something else: each of them combined different influences in their art, and the result was usually a multi-cultural product; and each of them went on to influence other generations of artists and architects.
Many Japanese families never spoke with relatives or friends about the time in internment camps, but they were deeply touched by this experience. The artists and designers in this documentary had the strength to turn it into a path towards freedom thanks to art. For Obata art was like food, it was nourishment for the soul, but it was also a force for social change as proved by Fujita, whose painting "When Emmett Till Died" (1955), about the brutal murder of a boy in the South, inaugurated the civil rights movement.
While Boch's documentary perfectly shows the power of art, design and creativity in our lives, it includes several messages about migration, prejudices and discrimination, better summarised by the late Ruth Asawa, who, towards the end of the documentary, states about the camps, "This can happen to anybody, this can happen to you too."
"Masters of Modern Design: The Art of the Japanese American Experience " by Akira Boch is on today and tomorrow at the Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York, as part of the Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF).
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