Tag: concentration camp

Estelle Peck Ishigo’s Life and Work Contrast Beauty with Despair

Jessica Williams 1 Comment

Now through December 31, 2018, the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center in Wyoming is staging the first significant showing of Estelle Peck Ishigo’s work in nearly 50 years. The Mountain Was Our Secret: Works by Estelle Ishigo includes ten watercolors by the artist on loan from JANM’s Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection and several of the artist’s pencil sketches, courtesy of the Bacon Sakatani collection.

 

Born in Oakland, California, in 1899, Estelle Peck was raised by a series of relatives in Southern California. In her twenties, Peck attended Otis Art Institute where she met and fell in love with aspiring Nisei actor Shigeharu Arthur Ishigo. Due to anti-miscegenation laws at the time, the pair were unable to marry in the United States, so they wed in Mexico in 1929.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, many businesses fired employees of Japanese descent. Estelle, because of her marriage, lost her position as an art teacher. When her husband was forcibly removed and incarcerated at Pomona, and later Heart Mountain, Estelle opted to go with him.

Because of her background as an art teacher, Estelle was recruited as a documentary reporter for the US War Relocation Authority. With this job, it was her responsibility to record the Heart Mountain experience in illustrations, line drawings, and watercolors. As evidenced in her art and writing, Estelle took her official work as a documentarian for the WRA seriously, making sure to accurately document the miserable conditions at the camp. Many of her pieces illustrated the lack of privacy and comfort in living quarters and latrines. Like many Heart Mountain artists, Estelle’s work often depicted the mountain itself, an imposing figure in a desolate landscape.

“Untitled,” painted in November 1943, depicts Heart Mountain and the rough landscape of the camp.

Estelle first began documenting conditions in the camp by using watercolors. However, she admitted to being frustrated by watercolor’s inability to fully capture the conditions in which Japanese Americans were forced to live, calling the medium too “clean and untroubled.” To remedy this shortcoming, Estelle created more charcoal and pencil drawings, many of which are in JANM’s online collection.

When she was released from Heart Mountain in 1945, all the art that she had created was considered the property of the government and seized. She managed, however, to smuggle out many pieces by hiding them between her and Arthur’s clothing. After the war, the Ishigos returned to Southern California and lived in a trailer park. They struggled to find steady employment. Arthur died in 1957, and Estelle lived hermetically until 1972 when her artwork was rediscovered and included in a California Historical Society exhibition. That same year, she worked with the Hollywood Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League to publish a book, Lone Heart Mountain, which recounts individual stories as well as shared realities of persons of Japanese descent before, during, and after incarceration.

In 1983, filmmaker Steven Okazaki heard of her story and sought to make a documentary about Estelle. While doing research for his film, Okazaki discovered Estelle was living in poverty and residing in a Los Angeles basement apartment. When he told her about his project, Estelle said, “I’ve been waiting for someone to tell my story. Now I can die.” She passed away in 1990, just before the release of the film, Days of Waiting, which went on to win a Peabody Award and an Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).

“Recital of Piano Students, Heart Mt.,” painted March 1944, shows the incarcerated participating in the arts.

Through her work, Estelle showed the duality of the American concentration camp experience. She had the unique ability to capture both the quotidian, tedious activities required for daily survival as well as scenes of respite, brief moments of joy amidst trauma. An excerpt from her book, Lone Heart Mountain, notes this binary experience: “Gathered close into ourselves and imprisoned at the foot of the mountains as it towered in silence over the barren waste, we searched its gaunt face for the mysteries of our destiny: and some spoke its name with the same ancient reverence, felt for their own mountains in Japan.”

The Mountain Was Our Secret is included with admission at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, which is $9 for adults and $7 for students and seniors. Children under 12 and members of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation are free. More information is available on their website.

This Summer, See Masumi Hayashi’s Work in Glendale

Jessica Williams Leave a comment

Now through July 8, 2018, three pieces from the JANM permanent collection by artist Masumi Hayashi are on view at ReflectSpace Gallery at the Downtown Central Library in Glendale. The photocollages, from Hayashi’s “American Concentration Camps” series, are presented as part of the library’s exhibition entitled Accused of No Crime: Japanese Incarceration in America, which weaves a personal narrative through photographs, art, and film to highlight stories of Japanese Americans forced into concentration camps during World War II. Hayahsi’s work is presented alongside pieces from Mona Higuchi and Paul Kitaguki as well as archival images from Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, among others. Admission to the library is free. More information about the display can be found here.

Gila River Camp, where Hayashi was born.
Gila River Relocation Camp, Foundations, 1990, panoramic photo collage. 22″x 56″

Born in the Gila River War Relocation Camp in Rivers, Arizona, just after the war ended, Hayashi spent her childhood in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she worked at her parents’ neighborhood market. She briefly attended UCLA before moving to Florida to be with her husband, who had joined the Navy. Hayashi later enrolled at Florida State University where she earned both her BA and MFA.

In 1982, Hayashi joined the Cleveland State University faculty as Professor of Photography. While at CSU, Hayashi received awards and fellowships from a number of institutions, including the Ohio Arts Council, the Civil Liberties Educational Fund, and Arts Midwest. She worked at the university until her death in 2006.

Hayashi developed a systematic photographic style that involved taking multiple exposures of a single subject and assembling them into large panoramic scenes that could be six feet across or larger. She is probably best known for her series “American Concentration Camps,” which centered on the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II.

According to the artist’s statement in 1997, preserved on her online museum’s website, “The viewer can instantly see a 360-degree panoramic view which would otherwise circle around her, thus the viewer becomes both prisoner and guard within the photograph’s memory.” Her work is often described as eliciting contradictory sensations. Former JANM curator Karin Higa in 2003 noted that there is a “suggestion of dysfunction between what you see and what you know—what you can’t find out” in her work. The “American Concentration Camps” series is no different, moving viewers to take in both the beauty of the landscape and the memory of what happened there as well as that which can never be known about either. As Hayashi once remarked, “What we’re living with is not always on the surface.”

Manzanar Relocation Camp, Monument, 1995, panoramic photo collage, 48″x 80″

Don’t miss the opportunity to see Hayashi’s work and all of Accused of No Crime.

Estelle Ishigo Drawing from JANM Collection Featured in National Constitution Center Exhibition

Collections Management & Access Leave a comment
Ishigo-500px
Estelle Ishigo’s drawing All In One Room, as it was prepared by Collections Staff for travel to the National Constitution Center

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is currently featuring the drawing All In One Room by Estelle Ishigo in their permanent exhibition The Story of We, the People.  The drawing will be on display through November of 2014.

Estelle Peck Ishigo (1899-1990) is most well known as an artist who chronicled the experience at the Heart Mountain concentration camp.

Estelle Peck was born in Oakland in 1899 to parents of English, Dutch, French ancestry.  Her family moved to Los Angeles and Estelle attended the Otis Art Institute, where she met Arthur Ishigo (1902-1957), a San Francisco-born Nisei who was working as a chauffeur for California Lieutenant Governor Robert Kenny.  As anti-miscegenation laws at the time prohibited interracial couples from getting married, Peck and Ishigo took a trip across the border to Tijuana to be wed in 1928. Hoping for a career as an actor, Arthur worked as a janitor at Paramount Studios while Estelle worked as an art teacher.  Shunned by her family, the couple lived among the Japanese American community.

Estelle Ishigo (Gift of Mary Ruth Blackburn, Japanese American National Museum [2000.103.12])
Gift of Mary Ruth Blackburn, Japanese American National Museum [2000.103.12].
With the outbreak of World War II and the removal of all West Coast Japanese Americans to inland concentration camps, the couple faced a dilemma. As a Nisei, Arthur was required to be removed while his wife was not. Though he wanted her to stay behind, she accompanied her husband, first to the Pomona Assembly Center in California, and then to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

Throughout the war years, Estelle drew, sketched, and painted what she saw, providing a valuable document of life in the American concentration camps. “Strange as it may sound, in this desolate, lonely place I felt accepted for the first time in my life,” she later wrote of her time at Heart Mountain. She and her husband remained at Heart Mountain in order to record the last days of the camp until it was officially closed. The Ishigos were given $25 and put on a train to the West Coast. “I felt as if I were part of a defeated Indian tribe,” she remembered later.

In 1990, filmmaker Steven Okazaki made a documentary of Estelle Ishigo’s life titled Days of Waiting. Estelle passed away before seeing the film, which went on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.

Estelle Ishigo’s story and drawings comprise an important aspect of the permanent collection at the National Museum. The Estelle Ishigo Collection can be seen on the Museum’s website at:  janm.org/collections/estelle-ishigo-collection

Learn more about Estelle Ishigo on our Discover Nikkei website >>

Submitted by Margaret Zachow Wetherbee, Collections Manager