With Their Lives Upended, They Practiced the Art of Resilience

Hibi’s images of the camps are, not surprisingly, somber, even depressing. Decades after her release, she spoke of the “fear, frustration and anxiety” she felt, and the humiliating conditions she had endured. “Tanforan Assembly Center” (1942) is a bird’s-eye view of the barracks, packed like sardines within the oval racetrack, hemmed in by dun-colored mountains beyond, entirely devoid of human life. The red skies of “Eastern Sky, 7:50 A.M.” (1945) and “Western Sky, Topaz, Utah” (1945) seem apocalyptic, like something out of an Edvard Munch fever dream.

While her graceful and colorful still lifes from the period seem far removed from the heaviness of the conditions in the camps, their flowers, fruit and vegetables were the product of her fellow inmates’ backbreaking labor in a landscape not at all conducive to farming.

Hayakawa showed her work actively in the 1940s and early ’50s at museums in New Mexico, but her career was cut short by her death in 1953 at age 53.

Even while Okubo was incarcerated, she continued to send work to exhibitions around the country, some of them organized by activists who opposed the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans. An editor at Forbes saw her work at one of these shows and invited her to contribute to the magazine; the job offer allowed her to leave the camp before the end of the war.

She supported herself as an illustrator in New York City. Eventually she devoted herself full time to her art; her painting style became playful, almost childlike, incorporating pictographs, bright colors and round-faced characters, as in “Boy, Rooster, Cat” (1964) and “Boy, Goat, Fruit” (before 1972). Her first solo exhibition was at the Oakland Museum in 1972.

Because Hibi and her family could not secure employment outside the West Coast — a condition the government set for release of those who were incarcerated — they were some of the last people to depart Topaz. They too moved to New York, where Hibi sustained her family by working as a seamstress, while continuing to paint. She and her husband were both diagnosed with cancer shortly after their release; he died in 1947, and she was left to raise their children.