Real Resilience

The Smithsonian showcases the work of three Japanese-American women artists whose careers were derailed by racial persecution during World War Tivo

- James D. Balestrieri

I wonder what would have happened had the United States not seen fit to uproot and incarcerate Japanese Americans—I should say, American citizens of Japanese descent—after Pearl Harbor and for the duration of World War Two. Apart from simply upholding the rights of citizens, whatever their origins, as the law of the land states, how would the cultural contributions of Japanese Americans have changed? What if painters like Miki Hayakawa, Miné Okubo and Hisako Hibi, whose careers were on the rise prior to 1941, hadn’t been derailed by scaremongering, unfounded prejudice and, ultimately, Executive Order 9066, the Presidential mandate that allowed the army to detain and relocate Japanese Americans in concentration camps? Roll back to 1939: Hayakawa, Okubo, and Hibi are the sole female Japanese American artists to represent the United States at the Golden Gate International Exposition. What if they hadn’t been forced to rebuild their lives and careers from the ground up after 1945?

Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, reintroduces us to their work while reminding us what resilience—a word that is thrown around these days like so much tissue paper—really means. Because what is truly amazing about the exhibition, apart from the ambition and quality of the artwork, is that all three of them, despite numerous obstacles and hardships, picked up their work after the war and continued to paint for the rest of their lives.