Captivity recaptured: Topaz exhibit shows resourcefulness of Japanese American artists

Delta • One of the unanswered questions about art created by Topaz internment camp internees is this: Where did they get their supplies — their paper and canvas, their ink and pastels, their oils and acrylic paint?

The Japanese-American artists forced to leave their homes in the Bay Area during World War II might have received packages from friends back in California, or ordered supplies from the Sears, Roebuck catalog or a mail-order art business, says Scotti Hill, an art historian in Salt Lake City.

But, as is evidenced in the remarkable exhibit at the new Topaz Museum in Delta, "When Words Weren't Enough: Works on Paper from Topaz, 1942-1945," the artists may very well have made some of their own mediums.

A number of pieces were painted in casein, which can be made from milk or cottage cheese, Hill notes.

Mine Okubo, an accomplished artist who had studied in Europe and worked with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in the Works Progress Administration, could have made her own gouache, using boiling water, gum Arabic, ground-up watercolor cakes and calcium carbonate.

An internee, she became one of the instructors in a thriving art school at Topaz.

Okubo's paintings, some of them abstract and others more representational, are a big part of the show, as well as of the Topaz Museum's permanent collection; 30 of the museum's 103 pieces were made by her.

The collection has been donated by descendants and friends, retrieved from Delta-area basements and stored for years as money was raised to build the museum, says Jane Beckwith, president of the volunteer board. "We know there's still a lot out there."

The museum doesn't officially open until September, but the art exhibit is open Mondays through Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m. at 55 W. Main in Delta. The exhibit will remain up through August.

The exhibit comprises 70 watercolors, charcoal drawings, ink wash, casein and gouache paintings and, in one case, an ink wash on the drywall doors of a wooden cabinet.

The doors were painted by Chiura Obata, an issei, or Japan-born artist who was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley before he was forced to move to the camp in Utah's west desert in September 1942.

Obata founded the art school at the camp where 11,212 Japanese Americans lived, at one time or another, from mid-1942 to late 1945. Topaz, named for a mountain to the east, was 16 miles northwest of Delta.

Altogether, more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were sent to inland internment camps and away from the coast, where the U.S. government feared they would conspire with Japan to attack the United States.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, ordering those of Japanese ancestry into camps, on Feb. 19, 1942, less than three months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Last weekend, members of the Japanese American Citizen League from the Salt Lake City area went to the museum and to Topaz for their annual Day of Remembrance program.

Obata and artists like Okubo offered 23 classes ranging from anatomy to flower arranging to wood-block printing. Some 600 internees from ages 5 to 65 took the classes.

The internees' lives were stark. They lived in small partitioned-off tarpaper barracks, with potbellied coal stoves unable to fully protect them from bitter cold in winter and nothing but desert breezes for air conditioning in summer.

They had to make all their furniture from scrap lumber, ate in mess halls and used the bathroom and bathed in large public buildings. Barbed wire surrounded the 17,500-acre camp, although the internees occasionally went into Delta on excursions and some were allowed to leave the camp for jobs elsewhere in Utah or other states.

But their lives were not entirely deprived: They were able to create art. "It ends up speaking of the resourcefulness of those interned," Hill says.

Distinctly Japanese art forms like wood-block printing ("The Great Wave" is an example) and ink-wash painting require extreme patience and precision, Hill says. "They definitely used art as a way of being industrious."

Hill, working with Beckwith and Kirk Henrichsen, exhibit designer, chose to focus on "works on paper," because the museum owns so many good examples. She sees it as a way to educate people about works on paper, which are often overlooked.

Unfortunately, some of the paper used by the camp's artists was inferior, and those pieces are falling apart and can't be shown.

Most of the 70 pieces on display come from five artists, including three issei and two nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans. Okubo was one of the latter and embraced more modern techniques than her elders.

A book she published later, "Citizen 13660," includes excerpts from the journal and examples of the art she created in camp.

Cameras were scarce — and officially banned — so artists knew their work would provide some of the only lasting images.

Among the drawings and paintings in the show are domestic scenes of coal piles outside barracks or internees lining up for mess hall or shielding their faces from a dust storm.

Others focus more on beauty.

Obata's artworks include a delicate purple iris and an example of Christmas cards he created to spread good will in the camp. One such watercolor shows a guard watchtower with a snow-capped Mt. Swasey behind.

Watercolors by Charles Erabu Suiko Mikami show Mt. Swasey and barracks in moonlight, or other Western mountains.

When another internee asked Mikami to illustrate a psalm, he painted deer along a brook, which the friend gave as a Christmas present, lamenting he had no silk for a painting.

After the war, according to "Topaz Moon" (the 2000 collection of Obata's artwork, edited by his granddaughter Kimi Kodani Hill), he wrote: "In any circumstance, anywhere and anytime, take up your brush and express what you face and what you think without wasting your time and energy complaining and crying out."

kmoulton@sltrib.com

Twitter: @KristenMoulton