Oakland Museum: Executive Order 9066 and Citizen 13660

At the Oakland Museum this morning, I came upon an exhibit of a horse stable like those that housed thousands of Japanese American families at the racetrack at Tanforan prior to their relocation to the internment camp in Topaz, Utah.

A museum docent tells me to be sure to see an exhibit the next floor up in the Art galleries, and I go in search of the art of Miné Okubo.

Miné Okubo was an Oakland artist who was was working for the Federal Government when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. She had been recently employed by the WPA Federal Arts Project, working with Diego Rivera on the 1939-40 mural created for the Golden Gate International Exhibition.

"Citizen 13660" was sent to the Tanforan stables where she stayed for 6 months before being relocated to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah.  Okubo documented her 16 months in the internment camp with her art, saying that the her time in the camps gave her a chance to study the human race from cradle to grave.

These 16 images come from Miné's diary recording her internment. The works were created using a technique known as cliché-verre, the process of etching an image on to a piece of glass, and then using the glass as a negative to print on a sheet of light-sensitive paper.

Following her confinement, Miné Okubo relocated to New York and published a book of her experiences, Citizen 13660, which documented, without bitterness, the indignities, struggle and sparse humor of daily life for internees at the camps. Named for the number assigned to her family unit, the book contains over two hundred of her pen and ink sketches accompanied by brief explanatory text. Published in 1946 and in print for more than 50 years since, the book provides a unique perspective on the historical record of the internment, as the first and autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience.

Nearby, in the same gallery, Dorothea Lange's "Japanese Children with Tags" is accompanied by a quote from the photographer that sticks with me.

"This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?"

... and I wonder why I hadn't been introduced to Miné Okubo sooner.