Masters of Modern Design - The Art of the Japanese American Experience

 

Masters of Modern Design - The Art of the Japanese American Experience was a documentary show we watched last night on YouTube from the KCET Artbound series. It was a very powerful and fascinating story of the influence of Japanese American artists and designers in postwar American art and design. It also told the story of this second generation of Japanese American artists were forced into concentration camps during World War II where they suffered intense hardship and discrimination that had a lasting and powerful effect on the lives of the artists in the documentary that included Ruth Asawa, George Nakashima, Isamu Noguchi, S. Neil Fujita and Gyo Obata.

I enjoyed this documentary very much and was familiar with the work of several of the artists although not with their lives. It was also very disturbing to see how Japanese Americans were treated during the war. They were uprooted from their homes on the West Coast and shipped to internment camps to live in squalor. It was amazing to see how so many of the artists and educators living in the camps rose up to help their people get through the ordeal. It certainly was a terrible thing that our government did to these American citizens by putting them all, men, women and children, into prison camps that were no different from any other concentration camp around the world. It was disgraceful.

These artists all had a major influence on American culture including sculpture, architecture, furniture and album cover design.