New Mexico’s Japanese Links

Emi Ozawa, Big Orange Bite, 2018, paper on board, unique variation edition, promised gift of Richard Levy and Dana Asbury, image courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery.

RIGHT: Labels like this one were attached to packing crates of produce sent from the Nakayama’s farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Lent by Jane Nakayama Cole and Peggy Swoveland.

THIS SUMMER, three exhibitions carry a thread that links them to each other. A Past Rediscovered: Highlights from the Palace of the Governors is a visual journey through New Mexico history. It also includes objects created by Japanese American men interned at New Mexico camps during World War II, a little-known moment in New Mexico history. One of the largest of the Japanese incarceration camps was built in Santa Fe, while another was operated in Lordsburg. Although prisoners, the Japanese American detainees maintained their culture, even running their own newspaper, the Santa Fe Jiho. The letters and other objects of Shodo Kawamura, Benjamin Tanaka, and Kunitaro Takeuchi record the imprisonment of immigrants from Japan and also U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry. They tell stories of resilience and creativity in the face of adversity. Down the hall in the Keleher Community History Gallery, Courage and Compassion: Our Shared Story of the Japanese American World War II Experience is on view through November. Nikki Nojima Louis, artistic director of JACL Players, the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League (NMJACL) theater group, curated the exhibition. She has a personal connection to internment camps: She and her mother were prisoners in Idaho, while her father was

interned in Santa Fe during World War II. Photographs and personal belongings from camp prisoners illuminate the stories of both the families in the camps and the local residents who befriended and helped them. For example, in Lordsburg, when members of the Methodist Church noticed that some of the men didn’t have winter clothing, townspeople donated coats to the church for delivery to the camp. Some women brought clothes that belonged to their husbands who were serving overseas. In Santa Fe, a local Episcopal minister would visit the men every other Sunday. He conducted services for the Episcopalians and evening prayer for anybody who wanted to attend. Unfolding Tradition features Japanese and Japanese American works on

paper by artists with links to New Mexico. Works range from nineteenthcentury woodblock prints from the Edo period (1615–1868), to contemporary prints, photographs, and paintings through which artists both engage with and redefine traditional Japanese subjects, techniques, and approaches to art. The exhibition covers enormous ground in a small space, beginning with the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury prints, modern takes on the Edo style, landscapes and abstract works, a Patrick Nagatani photograph depicting the nuclear threat of World War II, and contemporary works by Albuquerque-based artists Emi Ozawa and Kei Tsuzuki.

ON VIEW:

THROUGH SEPTEMBER 29

Unfolding Tradition: Works on Paper by Japanese Artists in the Collection

THROUGH OCTOBER 20

A Past Rediscovered: Highlights from the Palace of the Governors

THROUGH NOVEMBER 3

Courage and Compassion: Our Shared Story of the Japanese American World War II Experience

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