In honor of Day of Remembrance, visitors to The Noguchi Museum are invited to reflect on the enduring impact and lasting lessons of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Though exempt from the order as a New York resident, Isamu Noguchi voluntarily entered the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona, hoping to improve the conditions for fellow Japanese Americans there, a community that he had previously little known or identified with, but “of whom because of war I had suddenly become a part.”

From February 6–23, a selection of archival materials related to Noguchi’s incarceration in the Poston prison camp will be available to view in the Education Studio (Level C).

About the Display

In December 1941, after the attack of Pearl Harbor, Isamu Noguchi sought out other activists and intellectuals within the Japanese American community in California, where he was staying at the time. Together they quickly established the anti-fascist group the Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy to counteract the scapegoating their community received in the media while drawing attention to the real possibility of the forced removal of Japanese American citizens on the West Coast. As they predicted, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s issuing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, paved the way for the defining of military zones along the West Coast and the instituting of prison camps for these communities. Exempt from the order as a New York resident, Noguchi was able to return from California to meet with other activist allies and he attended hearings led by California Representative John Tolan of the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration on the enactment of EO 9066. By May 1942, Noguchi had voluntarily entered the Colorado River Relocation Center in Poston, Arizona, to work on programs for the prison camp, revealing his idealism for improving conditions there.

As he attempted to enact programs at Poston, Noguchi corresponded with the dispersed members of the Nisei Writers and Artists Mobilization for Democracy to learn how they were navigating their new lives within the prison camps. These friends included writers and editors who published newspapers operating outside of the restricted zone and others imprisoned in camps working on government-sanctioned newspapers. Noguchi’s friends included journalists Larry and Guyo Tajiri (who together published The Pacific Citizen from Salt Lake City, Utah); Eddie Shimano (editor of The Pacemaker at Santa Anita camp); and Shuji Fujii (previously editor of the magazine DOHO), assigned to Santa Anita with his wife, writer Kikue Fujii. While The Pacific Citizen was crucial to broadcasting the plight of those in the prison camps, the reporting on events and daily life in papers within the camps provided a small aspect of normalcy to readers within them. The correspondence displayed here conveys the sharing of news and contacts, and gives glimpses into tensions within the prison camps, including an episode in which Shuji Fujii was imprisoned after circulating a petition for support for a Japanese language paper for Santa Anita in order to circumvent efforts of a group of pro-Japan prisoners doing the same. (Fujii was eventually freed but he and Kikue were ordered to New York.)

Two prints on view represent earlier public projects by Noguchi: The Letter, a frieze commissioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for a post office in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, in 1939; and News, a commission for the Associated Press building at Rockefeller Center in New York City made between 1938–40. The reclining figure in The Letter depicts a moment of personal and solitary expression. In contrast, reflecting on his intentions for the dynamic News composition, Noguchi emphasized qualities of  “vitality” and “incisiveness” intrinsic to the technologically-empowered American press that he felt operated “from a vantage point above the tumult” of world events. Noguchi received widespread media coverage for News when it was unveiled, which he later used as leverage for his activism in 1941–42, gaining access to (initially) sympathetic federal officials. Each project illustrates Noguchi’s ability to graphically communicate essential protected functions of American democracy in innovative ways, using modern materials, while remaining legible to a wider public.