FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 10, 2015
Media Contacts: Katie Klapper, (323) 874-9667, [email protected] Mia Cariño, (310) 440-4544, [email protected]
Press Preview: Wednesday, October 7, 10:00–11:30 a.m. Reservations required: [email protected] or (310) 440-4582
Skirball Cultural Center presents
MANZANAR: THE WARTIME PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANSEL ADAMS October 8, 2015–February 21, 2016
Unexpected body of work by the celebrated landscape photographer illuminates his humanitarian and activist sensibilities
LOS ANGELES, CA—The Skirball Cultural Center presents Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams, featuring fifty little-known photographs by Ansel Adams (1902–1984) that depict the treatment of Japanese Americans at the Manzanar incarceration camp in central California. Taken during World War II, the black and white works were originally published in Adams’s book Born Free and Equal (1944) in which he protested what he called the “enforced exodus” of a minority of citizens. On view at the Skirball from October 8, 2015 through February 21, 2016, Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams offers insight into a disquieting period in California and American history.
“Ansel Adams’s photographs of Manzanar bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit and the urgency of confronting injustice, embracing diversity, and preserving community,” remarks Robert Kirschner, Skirball Museum Director. “Powerful forms of civic and artistic expression, the images capture Adams’s steadfast message of compassion and tolerance, and call us to recommit to this nation’s highest democratic ideals.”
In the exhibition, Adams’s portfolio is complemented by the work of contemporaries Dorothea Lange and Toyo Miyatake, who also photographed Manzanar during the war. Also on view are documents, publications, propaganda materials, artifacts, and artwork detailing life and conditions at the camp. Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams was organized by Photographic Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California. It is presented at the Skirball in association with the Japanese American National Museum.
Concurrently, the Skirball presents Citizen 13660: The Art of Miné Okubo. Based on an illustrated memoir of the same name, this companion exhibition features the work of Japanese American artist Miné Okubo (1912–2001), who recorded her everyday struggles at two incarceration camps through poignant pen and ink drawings and incisive commentary. Citizen 13660: The Art of Miné Okubo is also presented in association with the Japanese American National Museum.
Exhibition Overview
Located about 220 miles north of Los Angeles, the Manzanar War Relocation Center was the first of ten camps established to detain approximately 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent in the wake of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Pressured by the fear and paranoia sweeping the nation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War to “exclude” any residents from prescribed West Coast military areas in order to protect “against espionage and sabotage.” The majority of Japanese detained were native-born Americans or legal residents. Ultimately, Manzanar held 11,070 individuals, more than 90% from Los Angeles.
The exhibition opens with vivid examples of anti-Japanese propaganda, including cover art and articles from prominent publications such as Collier’s, LIFE, Vanity Fair, and Time. The pre-evacuation period is observed in numerous photographs Dorothea Lange took for the War Relocation Authority in 1942, one year prior to Adams’s own visit to Manzanar. Lange’s poignant imagesmany of them impounded for negatively portraying the governmentdocument Japanese Americans being forcibly relocated, leaving behind shops and schools, boarding crowded trains, and encountering primitive living quarters at the camp.
Highly regarded for his majestic landscapes, Ansel Adams was already an accomplished fine art and commercial photographer at the onset of the war. In 1943, his friend Ralph Merritt, director of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, invited Adams to document life at the camp. While several views of the austere Eastern Sierras recall Adams’s signature subject matter, the majority of Adams’s images taken at Manzanar focus on people and their day-to-day lives there. Many portraits show individuals in their professional attireas military personnel, a nurse, an artist, farmers, an electrician, among many others. Other photographs depict individuals engaged in various activities, such as baseball, Sunday school, a science lecture, working the potato fields, and standing in line at the mess hall. Adams also took photographs of several editions of the camp newspaper, the Manzanar Free Press, which was published by the incarcerated Nikkei (Japanese Americans).
Later sections of the exhibition chronicle day-to-day life at Manzanar. Incarceration records and identification cards represent how those at Manzanar lost their full rights and protections as American citizens. Other objects illustrate efforts to lead a “normal” life, including a movie ticket, senior prom program, and artwork made at the camp. Schoolchildren’s essays, video interviews, and home movies offer individual narratives. In contrast to Lange’s and Adams’s depictions of Manzanar, the photographs by Toyo Miyatake, who was incarcerated there with his family, provide an insider’s record of the experience. Shooting surreptitiously at first, Miyatake eventually became the official camp photographer.
The final section of the exhibition documents Japanese American acts of resistance. Newspaper articles cite fatal riots, and a legal brief is an example of lawsuits filed to protest incarceration. Several items relate to the prosecution of members of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, a group of young men who refused to cooperate with the military draft without first having their basic rights as citizens restored.
Citizen 13660: The Art of Miné Okubo
Presented in association with Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams, Citizen 13660: The Art of Miné Okubo explores the life and work of artist Miné Okubo. The exhibition centers on the graphic novel Citizen 13660, an illustrated memoir of her experience of incarceration during World
War II. Originally published by Columbia University Press in 1946, the volume is the first account of life in a camp from the perspective of an incarceree.
A resident of Berkeley, California, Okubo was given three days’ notice before she and her brother were forcibly relocated, first to the assembly center at Tanforan Racetrack outside San Francisco, and then to the Topaz Relocation Camp in Delta, Utah. 13660 was the government-issued number assigned to the Okubo family. In an effort to document the injustices of the camps, the young artist illustrated her two-year incarceration in more than 200 poignant images, accompanied by witty, candid text. Okubo left Topaz in January 1944 for a job with Fortune magazine, and subsequently went on to become a successful illustrator in New York. Citizen 13660 was reissued by the University of Washington Press in 1983 and received an American Book Award.
Citizen 13660: The Art of Miné Okubo explores Okubo’s exceptional book through a selection of rare original artwork and archival material that bring her personal and historical narrative to life. In addition to her portrayals of wartime, the exhibition lays out Okubo’s professional career and participation in the redress movement of the 1970s and 1980s, seeking an apology and reparations from the U.S. government for the incarceration of Japanese citizenry.
Exhibition-Related Programs
The Skirball will present several public programs related to the exhibitions. The documentary Children of the Campswhich follows six Japanese American adults as they reflect upon the traumatic effects of having been incarcerated as childrenwill be screened on Thursday, October 15, at 8:00 p.m. Following the screening, filmmaker and psychotherapist Satsuki Ina, PhD, who was born in an incarceration camp in 1944, will discuss the psychological trauma of immigrant detainees in America today with Ahilan Arulanantham, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Other related programs include a free matinee series exploring prejudice and patriotism in America during and following World War II; a reading by famed author Isabel Allende, whose forthcoming novel, The Japanese Lover, follows a couple torn apart when the young man and his family are sent to an incarceration camp; a book discussion group exploring novels by Asian American writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Ruth Ozeki; a course on Japanese art and the West; and a special three-session class and photo-tour, offered in partnership with Otis College of Art and Design, that will culminate in a weekend trip to the Manzanar National Historic Site. Additional public programs may be announced; information will be posted on skirball.org.
As part of its school outreach program, the Skirball will offer an exhibition school tour for middle and high school classes. By studying and discussing photographs, artifacts, and first-person accounts of individuals who fought to preserve their civil liberties, students will learn about critical moments in U.S. history and consider their relevance to American society today. Also designed to complement the exhibition, an intensive high school residency program will explore some of the critical civic issues facing students today in the diverse cultural landscape of Los Angeles. Through research, writing, and audio production, participants will investigate American identity and democracy, and work with a professional radio producer to create original, collaborative works to be presented at their school and at the Skirball.
Finally, in the Skirball’s teacher professional development initiative Teaching Our World Through the Arts, K–Grade 12 educators will take inspiration from Adams’s photographs of Manzanar to focus on photography, documentaries, and personal narrative.
MANZANAR: THE WARTIME PHOTOGRAPHS OF ANSEL ADAMS AND ITS RELATED PROGRAMS AT THE SKIRBALL CULTURAL CENTER ARE MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY SUPPORT FROM:
Associates from The Capital Group Irene Hirano Inouye The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Specialty Family Foundation Lannette and Scott Turicchi
MEDIA SPONSORS:
KCETLink Media Group Los Angeles magazine
About the Skirball
The Skirball Cultural Center is dedicated to exploring the connections between 4,000 years of Jewish heritage and the vitality of American democratic ideals. It welcomes and seeks to inspire people of every ethnic and cultural identity. Guided by our respective memories and experiences, together we aspire to build a society in which all of us can feel at home. The Skirball Cultural Center achieves its mission through educational programs that explore literary, visual, and performing arts from around the world; through the display and interpretation of its permanent collections and changing exhibitions; through an interactive family destination inspired by the Noah’s Ark story; and through outreach to the community.
Visiting the Skirball
The Skirball Cultural Center is located at 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049. Museum hours: Tuesday–Friday 12:00–5:00 p.m.; Saturday–Sunday 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.; closed Mondays and holidays. Admission to exhibitions: $10 General; $7 Seniors, Full-Time Students, and Children over 12; $5 Children 2–12. Exhibitions are always free to Skirball Members and Children under 2. Exhibitions are free to all visitors on Thursdays. For general information, the public may call (310) 440-4500 or visit skirball.org. The Skirball is also home to Zeidler’s Café, which serves innovative California cuisine in an elegant setting, and Audrey’s Museum Store, which sells books, contemporary art, music, jewelry, and more.