Press Releases January 18, 2008

Winter Exhibitions Open January 22

The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946
A Place Called Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams
Pamina Traylor's Tagged
Manzanar and Tule Lake: A Soundscape by Richard Lerman

THE ART OF GAMAN: ARTS AND CRAFTS FROM THE JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT CAMPS 1942-1946. This powerful collection comprises 100 examples of art created by Japanese American internees who were incarcerated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the subsequent U.S. declarations of war.

This exhibition is based upon a ground-breaking book, The Art of Gaman (Ten Speed Press, 2005) by Delphine Hirasuna, who is the guest curator and the speaker and guest of honor at the February 19th Day of Remembrance program at the Benton at 4 pm.

Viewed as potential threats to national security, men and women, children, the elderly and the infirmed, primarily from the West Coast, were given just a few days to put their affairs in order, gather only the personal belongings they could carry, and report to assembly centers at local racetracks, horse pavilions and fairgrounds. There they remained for four to six months while ten internment camps were constructed to house them in remote parts of California, Arkansas, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Colorado. The internees were imprisoned behind barbed wire, in inhumane conditions, guarded by armed soldiers. To survive, they turned to the practice of gaman (meaning "enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity"), and created the remarkable works in this exhibition. They carved sculptures of bears, birds and elephants, as well as three monkeys and a scholar; built chairs, chests of drawers, model ships and heart pendants from scrap wood; wove baskets from unraveled twine; made rings from peach pits and pins from shells and beans. What they created represents a deeply moving testimony to the nobility of the human spirit in adversity.

This exhibition is based upon the book The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946 by Delphine Hirasuna (The Speed Press, 2005) and was first held at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art. The touring exhibition has been organized by the William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, and the Oregon Historical Society in collaboration with the National Japanese American Historical Society. The Benton presentation is made possible with the support of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Nathan Hale Inn and Conference Center, and in partnership with the University of Connecticut Asian American Cultural Center, Asian American Studies Institute, and the Foundations of Humanitarianism program.


Simultaneously, the Benton will present three exhibitions that complement THE ART OF GAMAN: A PLACE CALLED MANZANAR, MANZANAR AND TULE LAKE: A SOUNDSCAPE by Richard Lerman, and Pamina Traylor's TAGGED.

A PLACE CALLED MANZANAR: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANSEL ADAMS
In 1943, distinguished American photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984) captured through his lens the individuals, daily life, work, and pastimes in the Manzanar War Relocation Center, located at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, approximately two hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. Of his photos, Adams wrote when he offered the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.... All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document." The Benton's selection from the extensive holdings of the Library of Congress are exhibited in conjunction with THE ART OF GAMAN, further contextualizing the experience of the Japanese American internees. The photographs in this exhibition are contemporary prints from "Suffering under a Great Injustice: Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar," in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.

MANZANAR AND TULE LAKE: A SOUNDSCAPE by Richard Lerman
This audio piece was recorded at two Japanese-American internment camps in California and captures sounds of the wind blowing through barbed wire, plants, tree limbs, old foundations of barracks and windharps.

PAMINA TRAYLOR'S TAGGED is a meditation on the nature of ethnic prejudice. Images are photo transferred onto solid-sculpted glass "tongues." The majority of the photographs are altered reproductions of photos by Dorothea Lange, taken for the War Relocation Authority during the period that Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to internment camps. The "book" shows a family photograph from the Topaz Internment Camp, with the artist's mother shown as a young girl. The newspaper clippings, primarily from The New York Times, are about recent ethnic prejudice directed against Arab-Americans. All the clippings are from September 11, 2001 to 2004, when the work was completed. TAGGED is being presented as part of the on-going Dialogues program in conjunction with THE ART OF GAMAN.

ROME, ITALY AND EUROPE illustrates the various ways the classical tradition and the Italian landscape influenced European art between 1600 and 1800. At the center of the European art world was Rome and, despite the rise in importance of Paris and London in the 18th century, Rome remained the most important cultural center until the 19th century. Rome was, above all, the source of the western European classical tradition, visibly manifested by the Roman architectural and sculptural monuments that dominated the city. And there was the Italian landscape, especially the Roman Campagna, the lands stretching south and east of the city. The landscape and light of the Campagna inspired artists until the end of the 19th century. The city's warm climate, exotic fruit trees, and long history attracted Dutch, Flemish, English, French and German artists from the 17th century on, for few artists could avoid the weight of the classical tradition nor the landscape that Rome and Italy embodied. The exhibition is drawn from the permanent collection of the Benton Museum and includes generous loans from the collection of Asbjorn R. Lunde.