Isamu Noguchi, My Arizona, New York, 1943 (collection of the Noguchi Museum).
Moonscape of the Mind: Japanese American Design after Internment
Moonscape of the Mind: Japanese American Design after Internment, held April 14–15, is a multifaceted research initiative in which scholars from across the humanities, art, and design disciplines will explore the legacies of the Japanese incarceration of WWII by closely considering a specific work by a Japanese American designer, architect, or artist.
“The memory of Arizona was like that of the moon… a moonscape of the mind…Not given the actual space of freedom, one makes its equivalent – an illusion within the confines of a room or a box – where imagination may roam, to the further limits of possibility and to the moon and beyond.“
—Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World
Symposium Overview
In May 1942, Isamu Noguchi voluntarily entered Poston, one of ten euphemistically-named ‘Internment Centers’ authorized by Executive Order 9066. Not long after, the sculptor made My Arizona (1943), one of a series of abstract lunar landscapes created in response to his experiences in the desert. The sculpture features a hot pink Plexiglass plane hovering over a white desert landscape, its fluorescent cast glowing hotly over the abstracted forms of conical mounds and valleys below.
Noguchi’s work speaks to the powerful connections between material objects and their creators’ lived experiences of trauma––including the physical places and broader cultural landscapes in which they occurred. Likewise, the artist’s evocative description of his “memory of Arizona”––which he later described as a “moonscape of the mind”––speaks to the problem of remembering when one is denied “the actual space of freedom” in which to imagine. The problem can become even more acute, and far-reaching, when a community of memory never quite forms, as happened for many survivors.
Drawing inspiration from Noguchi, Moonscape of the Mind explores the hidden legacies of the Japanese American incarceration––“hidden,” that is, in plain sight, in the rich and complex landscapes of mid-century American culture. Survivors of internment created some of the architectural, artistic and design hallmarks of mid-century cultural life, embraced as “American,” “democratic,” and definitively “modern” in all senses. Yet their authors’ experiences as citizen-detainees were rarely acknowledged in that post-war world, even by the survivors themselves. The broader history of incarceration has been marginalized, and is “marked” by [long] silences and strategic forgetting.”1
This symposium asks what singular objects of art and design might teach us about those experiences, and the broader impacts and significance of incarceration. How have such works given expression to the central conflicts of identity and exclusion experienced by the Japanese American community during the war, and helped their creators to navigate between hopelessness and action? What new meanings did they take on in a post-war period of “rebuilding” and “re-integration,” shaping social identities, and carrying (or perhaps suppressing) collective memory? And how can they help us think in new ways about the ongoing legacies of incarceration and racial exclusion decades later?
Moonscape of the Mind is part of a larger research and archival initiative based at Washington University in St. Louis. WashU was one of a handful of institutions that accepted Japanese Americans as students during the internment period. About 30 attended the university, and four of them––Gyo Obata, Richard Henmi, George Matsumoto, and Fred Toguchi––went on to be architects of note. Their work and experiences will be featured in Beauty in Enormous Bleakness, an on-site exhibition during the conference.
Moonscape of the Mind is organized by Assistant Professor Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, Assistant Professor Heidi Aronson Kolk, and Lynnette Widder of Columbia University.
Schedule
Friday, April 14, 2023
4 p.m.
Welcome
Kelley Van Dyck Murphy
Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School
Heidi Aronson Kolk
Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School
Lynnette Widder
Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Columbia University
4:10 p.m.
Opening Remarks
Heather Woofter
Director of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design
Sam and Marilyn Fox Professor
4:20 p.m.
Keynote Address, “Moonscapes of the Mind: In-Between Space”
Ken Tadashi Oshima
Professor of Architecture, University of Washington, Seattle
Ken Tadashi Oshima is a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he teaches trans-national architectural history, theory and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians for lifetime achievement and served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2016-18.
Oshima’s publications include Kiyonori Kikutake: Between Land and Sea (Lars Müller/Harvard GSD, 2015), Architecturalized Asia (U. Hawai’i Press/Hong Kong U. Press, 2013), GLOBAL ENDS: towards the beginning (Toto, 2012), International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku (U. Washington Press, 2009) and Arata Isozaki (Phaidon, 2009).
He curated GLOBAL ENDS: towards the beginning (Gallery MA, 2011), Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea: Works of Kiyonori Kikutake (Harvard GSD, 2012), SANAA: Beyond Borders (Henry Art Gallery 2007-8) and was a co-curator of Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive (Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2017) and Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond (UPenn, UCSB, Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, 2006-7).
He was an editor and contributor to Architecture + Urbanism for more than 10 years, co-authoring the two-volume special issue, “Visions of the Real: Modern Houses in the 20th Century” (2000). His articles on the international context of architecture and urbanism in Japan have been published in journals including Architectural Review, Architectural Theory Review, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Kenchiku Bunka, Japan Architect, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and the AA Files.
5:45 p.m.
Beauty in Enormous Bleakness Exhibition Opening and Reception
more information
Saturday, April 15, 2023
9 a.m.
Opening Remarks
Carmon Colangelo
Ralph J. Nagel Dean
E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts
9:15 a.m.
Introduction to Session I
Lynnette Widder
Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Columbia University
Session I: The Architectural Scale
Although architecture may be constrained by parameters far more powerful than those of personal expression, the work of the most well-known Japanese American architect of the post-war period, Minoru Yamasaki, made much of its expressive capacity. Papers in this session will raise questions about potential correlations between Yamasaki’s architectural decisions and questions of Japanese identity, whether through his clientele, his own encounters with his parents’ country of origin or his response to mass housing. For Isamu Noguchi, on the other hand, as this session’s fourth paper describes, the experience of voluntary incarceration in the Poston camp prompted work at territorial scales, expanding upon the more personally expressive scale of sculpture in which he had dealt until then.
9:20 a.m. “Confinement, Agency and Design: Minoru Yamasaki and Pruitt-Igoe”
Michael Allen
Senior Lecturer, Sam Fox School
9:40 a.m. “Isamu Noguchi and the Heart of the City”
Eric Mumford
Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox School
10 a.m. “Minoru Yamasaki & the legacy of the World Trade Center”
Justin Beal
Independent scholar / artist
10:20 a.m. “Between Two Worlds: Minoru Yamasaki’s Japanese Cultural and Trade Center”
Dale Gyure
Interim Chair of Architecture and Professor, Lawrence Technological University
10:40 a.m. Comments | Q&A
11 a.m.
Break
11:15 a.m.
Introduction to Session II
Heidi Aronson Kolk
Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School
Session II: The Object Scale
There is much documentation of how vernacular traditions were shared during incarceration. Papers in this session consider how such practices, and camp life, impacted artists who emerged from the experience of incarceration, and might have translated into the work of personal or community memory. At stake is the work of four artists working in textile, paper, wood and photography. Whether destined for the gallery, the world of commercial art, or the lifeworld of one of the camps, these works not only testify to the complexities of incarceration and postwar life, but give voice to such things as hope, faith, longing, grief, identity and community.
11:20 a.m. “Kay Sekimachi’s Ogawa II”
Christina Hiromi Hobbs
Stanford University
11:40 a.m. “A Cross for Wakasa-San: Funerary Paper Flowers and Grief as Resistance”
Elissa Yukikko Weichbrodt
Associate Professor of Art, Covenant College
12 p.m. “Learning Is Empowering: A Story Behind George Nakashima’s Odakyu Cabinet”
Sanae Nakatani
Associate Professor, Tokyo Metropolitan University
12:20 p.m. “Keeping the Calendar: Essential Elements of Tets Yamashita’s Photography”
Mari Yamashita de Moya
Independent artist
12:40 p.m. Comments | Q&A
1-1:45 p.m.
Break for lunch
1:45 p.m.
Introduction to Session III
Kelley Van Dyck Murphy
Assistant Professor, Sam Fox School
Session III: The Scale of Civic Action
Art making in the framework of activism, whether through publishing, public art or participatory engagement, was a vital part of post-incarceration production. This session describes how both better-established media – mural painting and sculpture – as well as more novel artistic practices – critical ethnography and the kitchen table as archive – operated as a site of civic action or resistance in the hands of four Japanese American artists in the era following incarceration.
1:50 p.m. “Yuri Kochiyama’s Kitchen Table”
Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra
Yale University
2:10 p.m. “Glass, Paper, Ground: Paul Horiuchi’s Seattle Mural”
Andrew Wasserman
Professorial Lecturer, American University
2:30 p.m. “Citizen 13600: Decolonizing Architectural Ethnography”
Aki Ishida
Associate Professor of Architecture, Virginia Tech
2:50 p.m. “Shinkichi Tajiri: Made in America”
Marin Sullivan
Independent Scholar
3:20 p.m. Comments | Q&A
3:45 p.m.
Break