Abstract
Between April 1942 and May 1943, Chiura Obata produced more than one hundred drawings and paintings that document the US government’s forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. Fluid and immediate, Obata’s imagery stands as one of the most comprehensive first-person, real-time visual representations of the collective trauma. As insightful and powerful as these pictures are, however, the visuals alone provide little information about the fraught circumstances under which the artist made his work. Leveraging the textual archive, this essay activates a deeper understanding of Obata’s determined visual records, produced with a prescient grasp of the historic magnitude of the unfolding events as well as a sense of defiance and resistance.
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