In the first section of the show, called “Prelude/Incarceration,” the layout and feel (designed by Stephanie Goto) nod to the claustrophobic impact of the stark camp buildings themselves: a long narrow wall covered in black mimics the cheap tar paper that lined the camps’ barracks—what amounted to elongated, wind-leaking shacks. (As an adult, the poet Mitsuye Yamada remembered inmates in Minidoka, the camp in Idaho, using mess hall butter knives to stuff cracks in the walls with newspapers and rags, writing: “But the Idaho dust/ persistent and seeping,/ found us crouched/ under the covers.”) The pre-internment work of both Noguchi and Nakashima—a supercool Bakelite baby monitor, its shape a cross between an American nurse’s cap and a kendo sparring mask, by the former; a deliriously compact black walnut lounge chair by the latter—is exhibited alongside Amino’s Air Raid, a sky-searching figure holding a wounded body in their arms that reads like a prayer against war. Anti-Japanese sentiment had motivated Amino’s move from Los Angeles to New York in 1935; the US deemed East Coast Japanese populations as more dispersed and thus less of a threat.
The counterpoints to the pre-camp pieces are those made within the camp wires, both by adults and children. Nakashima and Fujita were adults when their families were forced from Seattle and LA, respectively; while Noguchi entered the Poston War Relocation Center—built on the Colorado River Indian Reservation—voluntarily, in hopes of organizing a farm collective and craft school, both of which foundered. (Noguchi managed to return to New York after six months.) Without schools, adults in the camps organized classes: three suddenly unemployed Disney artists, for example, taught the teenage Asawa drawing for four to five hours a day. “It was my first experience, in a serious way, with how an artist works,” she would later recall.
