Manzanar
2024. Acrylic, charcoal, paper on canvas. 11 x 14 in.

My mother’s lifelong best friend wrote a memoir of her youth, which of necessity included some of my mother’s youth, too. They were girls together in the San Gabriel Valley, on the unfashionable east side of Los Angeles, during World War II. And reading the memoir I learned something I’d never heard my mother speak of: the removal of one of their chums from the school and the community because she was Japanese-American, and how the young friends were all in tears.

Manzanar is one of the camps where citizens of Japanese descent were incarcerated by the U.S. government during the war. It’s found in a spectacular location, at the eastern base of the soaring Sierra Nevada mountains, in the remote Owens Valley. Windswept, dusty, it is now a National Historic Site, and one can visit reconstructions of the crude barracks where the prisoners lived. After the camp was closed down in 1945 most of the original barracks were auctioned off, and you can still see them on properties up and down the valley, where local residents relocated them as outbuildings. Change comes only slowly in the Owens Valley.

Since national designation in 1985 the site has been developed slowly as an historic center. When I was there last, in 2023, the orchard and garden areas that had been planted by inmates were being restored, and the visitor center was full of exhibits that told me so much I had never known – even though I was born just eight years after the end of the war, and though I had grown up in an area that had had numerous Japanese American truck farms. I’ve written before about the San Gabriel Nursery, which was fully operative in my youth despite having been closed down and lost when the family that ran it was incarcerated; they came back and rebuilt across the street from the original location, and it remains part of my life to this day.

I was aware that there were camps during the war, but somehow unaware how close it all was to my own life. How could that be?

Thanks to the existence of the Manzanar Historic Site facility, I have learned. But that precious cultural project may be ending. Per the SF Gate, Manzanar is one of the sites that must now follow a new federal executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” which, along with follow-up memoranda, “instructs park service superintendents to identify and flag signs, exhibits, films and other public-facing content disparaging U.S. history.” According to the SF Gate, Park Service units are also now required to post signs requesting visitors to “report ‘negative’ depictions of the U.S. that they believe violate the new policy.” 

It’s hard to see the historical reality of Manzanar squaring with the current Administration’s self-flattering fantasy image of our nation. Will the voices of the folks who were incarcerated there once again be silenced? Will the regime succeed in disappearing not only anyone who does not match their script, but also any evidence of their struggles ever having taken place?

The collage Manzanar was an important transition piece between the collection I showed in January 2024, based on a single-color ground, and the black-and-white-based works I’ve been producing since then. Rather than sticking to a single color, which I had been doing, here I stained the background in three colors – a muted red and an ochre atop a pale Naples yellow. And, for the first time, I collaged on an entire piece of brayering-off paper, that layered-looking section you see on the right. This was a few months after my 2023 visit to Manzanar, and that lasting impression plus these changes in process all came together with a conviction that surprised me.

As it turns out, the move to a multi-color ground has not stuck around. Instead, right after this piece, I began leaving color out of the background entirely and going with the base of black and white. But the brayering-off elements have really taken over, as you can see here and here and here – basically, most of the work I’ve done over the past year and a half.

At the time I created the piece it was meaningful to me. But now, in this era of disappearance, remembering the past – individual and collective – seems a project of desperate importance.

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