Effects of Artistic Institutional Access During and After Japanese American Internment

Beginning in 1942 with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent were interned at concentration camps across the Western United States. At the time, approximately the same number of people of Japanese descent lived in the contiguous states, around two-thirds of whom were American citizens; over the decades prior, they had built thriving communities and institutions catering to both their Japanese American and a broader Asian American identity. Asian Americans at the time occupied a diverse array of industries, including finance, food and hospitality, sciences and research, film, music, and visual arts, and saw success despite layered racial barriers in each. When forced relocation and internment struck the Japanese American community, many of its members refused to sit idly in incarceration, and forged communal livelihoods and infrastructure often mirroring their prewar areas of expertise. However, circumstances for individuals and families after internment ended were difficult and varied. Many returned to find their former homes and lands destroyed, sold, and/or reoccupied, and continued on to face psychological trauma, fractures in subjective identity, and anti-Asian racism. While some managed to resurrect their careers postwar, others, limited especially by professional factors and proximity to socio-economic privilege, did not achieve similar outcomes. As documented and archived by the Japanese American Research Project, the life outcomes of the Ishigo and Hibi households, who had each had limited but somewhat comparable institutional power as artists during internment, diverged significantly postwar upon the widowing of each couple’s wife. Despite sharing experiences of Japanese American identity and community during internment, Estelle Peck Ishigo and Hisako Shimizu Hibi demonstrated highly divergent career trajectories after being widowed due to pre- and postwar differences in institutional and community access.

Estelle Peck was born in 1899 in Oakland, California to White American parents who were both fine artists (a landscape painter and an opera singer, respectively). After experiencing abusive and difficult childhood circumstances, she trained at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles before meeting Arthur Ishigo, a San Franciscan nisei, in 1928. She (hereafter Estelle Ishigo) and Arthur married in the same year in Mexico, due to laws against miscegenation in California. When her husband was forcibly interned, Estelle chose to accompany him, and they eventually were sent to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, one of the country’s harshest and most remote camps, whose surviving artistic record continues to surface and draw public interest today (Wyoming Public Media). Although Estelle was not herself of Asian descent, she demonstrated considerable participation and willing membership as an entrant to the local Japanese American community. Once inside Heart Mountain, the War Relocation Authority recruited her as an official “Documentary Reporter,” commissioning her to record camp life in drawings and watercolours, a body of work now held as the Ishigo (Estelle) Papers at UCLA Library Special Collections (Ishigo, Papers). Her surviving sketches capture the texture of daily camp life in granular detail: art instruction sessions held for fellow incarcerees (“Art Student League”), recreational baseball games organised within the camp’s fences (“Baseball Game”), communal block meetings through which residents self-governed (“Block Meeting”), and a makeshift Buddhist shrine that preserved religious practice under confinement (“Buddhist Shrine”). While there, she also played violin in the camp’s Mandolin Band, and helped to produce its community newspaper. In other words, she had had some small amount of institutional access and power as an artist during internment, presumably due at least in part to her race. When the war ended and the camp began releasing its internees — a moment Estelle herself sketched as residents boarded trucks bound away from Heart Mountain for good (“Boarding the Truck”) — the Ishigo couple found various labour jobs until Arthur died in 1957, after which Estelle disappeared into poverty and isolation for over a decade, a gap that the finding aid for her papers, which frames its holdings within the years 1941 to 1957, leaves largely undocumented (Ishigo (Estelle) Papers, 1941–1957). Her book Lone Heart Mountain, written and illustrated using her wartime sketches, was published in 1972 with assistance from the Hollywood chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (Ishigo, Lone Heart Mountain). However, she continued to live in obscurity and eventually severe poverty until filmmaker Steven Okazaki found her in a convalescent hospital with both legs amputated. He created Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo (1990), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short (Days of Waiting). Estelle died in February 1990, shortly before the film was finished.

Matsusaburo “George” Hibi was born in Japan in 1886. After immigrating to the United States in 1906, he settled in San Francisco, California, where he came to co-found the East West Art Society and became a significant presence among Japanese American artists in the Bay Area and California at large (Densho Encyclopedia, “George Matsusaburo Hibi”). In 1930, he married Hisako Shimizu (hereafter Hisako Hibi), a fellow arts student, and their family ran a Japanese language and art school. After being interned at Tanforan Assembly Center (a converted racetrack where families were housed in horse stalls), he co-founded an art school which enrolled over 600 students, its curriculum and daily operations preserved today in the Hibis’ own subject files on the Tanforan school (“Tanforan and Topaz Art School, 1942–1945”); after later being relocated to a camp in Topaz, Utah, he and his co-founder rebuilt the school there, an effort documented in the exhibition catalogues and guestbook the rebuilt school produced for the camp community (“Topaz Art School Exhibition Catalogues and Guestbook”). These records, together with George’s own writings from the period, now form part of the Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo George Hibi Papers acquired by the Archives of American Art in 2023 (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; “Matsusaburo ‘George’ Hibi’s Notes and Writings”). Like Estelle, Matsusaburo and the Hibi family had wielded considerable influence insofar as artistic institutions and infrastructure were concerned during internment. Although Matsusaburo’s institutional power was internally-founded rather than externally-imposed, each artist was still a recognisable member of and contributor to their Japanese American community during this period. Unlike Estelle, however, upon being widowed in 1947, Hisako Hibi supported her children as a seamstress, eventually returning to San Francisco and finding a patron in Helen Salz, “a prominent artist, poet, and co-founder of the Presidio Open Air School” (Densho Encyclopedia, “Hisako Hibi”). Initially hired by Salz as a live-in housekeeper, Hisako was given studio space to paint, coming to join the San Francisco Women Artists in 1960, exhibiting continuously onward from her first solo show in 1970, and becoming a founding member of the Asian American Women Artists Association in 1989 (Densho Encyclopedia, “Hisako Hibi”). Despite the material dispossession and continuing racism that people of Japanese descent faced in America following their release from state internment (the latter of which Estelle did not realistically face to a comparable extent), Hisako re-established and in fact strengthened her artistic career into one of flourishing achievement. She wrote her own memoir before passing away in 1991.

Clearly, as stated, the life trajectories of Estelle Ishigo and Hisako Hibi diverged significantly after they were each respectively widowed, even though they were both interned by the American state, carried some amount of institutional designation and contributed to the artistic dynamism of their communities during internment, and even both worked outside of the fine arts after initial release from internment. However, a host of differing circumstances pre- and postwar contributed to the following divergence. For instance, Hisako Hibi had already demonstrated a stronger professional footing before the war; she had trained formally at the California School of Fine Arts, and was juried into the Golden Gate International Exposition alongside fellow Japanese American artists Miki Hayakawa and Miné Okubo shortly before internment began, a prewar pedigree later recognised when curators reunited the three women’s work in the retrospective exhibition Pictures of Belonging (Japanese American National Museum). Although Estelle Ishigo had also been formally trained in the arts, her archived artistic career seems in contrast to have been mostly defined by her actual experiences documenting the Japanese American community that arose inside internment camps, which of course ended alongside internment itself. Even though her artistic career was ostensibly more independent from that of her non-artist husband than Hisako’s was to Matsusaburo’s ventures, and thus distanced from a minoritised Japanese American identity, it seems that she could not be sustained alone by an institutional sponsorship that depended upon her internment. Rather, the sheer amount of institutional access and prestige that the Hibi household had shared before the war contributed majorly to the later success of the widowed Hisako. Although of course not disproving the myriad evidence for the dependence of United States civil society upon White supremacy and its perpetuation, it does demonstrate that individual narratives must be markedly nuanced by inspection of material conditions as situated within the socio-economic context of the fine arts world at the time. Crucially, although institutional racism is of course a pervasive and continuing issue that affects the careers of most Asian American artists, intersectional disadvantages in gender, class, personal connectedness, and perceived social standing also often coalesce and come to affect artists of Asian as well as non-Asian descent. Material institutional access, both historically and at present, is expectedly majorly predictive of concrete career outcomes in the fine arts as well as outside of it. Especially as Estelle Ishigo and her art portrayed physically embodied experiences of oppression and community that are even presently still central components of Japanese American identity, binary hierarchical labels and conceptualisations of racial power structures cannot capture the diverse histories of individuals in community with Americans of Asian descent.

After widowhood, too, Estelle and Hisako shared divergences in material support and social access. As previously stated, Hisako found an artistic patron in Helen Salz after returning to San Francisco. Comparatively, the archival records of Estelle show no such return to an artistic career; her papers’ finding aid closes its record in 1957, the year of Arthur’s death, well before her eventual rediscovery decades later (Ishigo (Estelle) Papers, 1941–1957). It remains mostly unclear based on these archives what had happened between her widowhood and being found by Okazaki a hospitalised and heavily-medicated amputee. Additionally, although likely not as a direct result of her and her husband’s involvements in community-based artistic organisations during the war, Hisako Hibi found a degree of community access that Estelle Ishigo was not privileged to. As previously stated, Hisako (likely thanks to existing connections and established professional prestige) joined the San Francisco Women Artists in 1960 and became a founding member of the Asian American Women Artists Association in 1989 (Densho Encyclopedia, “Hisako Hibi”). The latter of these existed specifically because of the Asian American politico-cultural movement of the 1970s and 80s, and was actively working to recover and celebrate nisei and issei artists as a part of community memory. Hisako also personally testified before the hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), where the testimonials of over 750 witnesses to internment eventually led to redress for incarceration with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Beyond artistic merits, Hisako Hibi celebrated career and life milestones owing specifically to her identity as an American of Japanese descent, and the efforts by Asian American advocates to have stories like hers be heard and institutionally recognised. Despite having been rather literally a state-sanctioned witness to the same internment, however, Estelle Ishigo was not recognised by the same efforts to build Japanese American community memory, and her rediscovery was comparatively incidental. She told Steven Okazaki “I’ve been waiting for someone to tell my story[…]then I can die,” and in fact did die before his film was actually finished (Days of Waiting); scholar Elena Tajima Creef reads this dying testimony as central to the documentary’s gendered staging of historical trauma, in which Ishigo’s own body becomes both evidence of and witness to internment’s long afterlife (Creef). Although it is difficult to make definitive historical claims based on the absence of evidence in Estelle Ishigo’s archive, it is clear that conceptualisations of community belonging that superseded lived experience affected her comparative lack of recognition to artists like Hisako Hibi, and contributed at least partially to the state in which she was found by filmmaker Okazaki. Although it is of course inarguable that Estelle Ishigo did not share entirely similar experiences of Japanese American identity to Hisako Hibi or almost any other wartime internee due to not being ethnically Japanese, it remains true that each woman substantially shared the physically embodied narratives of incarceration that shaped their respective careers. Rather than arguing the case of Estelle Ishigo as a failure of White systems to systematically uphold White supremacy, the unique “Japanese American-ness” or proximity to such of Estelle’s art and life choices (e.g. marrying Arthur Ishigo in Mexico, and choosing to join him in internment at all) appear a more influential and probable factor. As the Asian American movement is itself coming to recognise, no one aspect of a person’s background or identity, be it race, ethnicity, parental background, birth country, immigration status, adoptive status, or any other such factor, may determine their membership and experiences of the ever-nebulous Asian American-ness.

To conclude, Estelle Ishigo and Hisako Hibi were both women artists who endured the Japanese American internment of the Second World War. Despite both wielding some limited amount of institutional legitimacy as well as informal activity within the artistic worlds of their respective communities during incarceration, and experiencing similar material dispossessions and difficulties upon initial release, the widowings of each woman marked a turning point in their respective artistic careers. While Hisako benefitted from previously-established career prestige as well as material support and new cultural movements that explicitly sought to recognise and relay her talent and stories to the American public, Estelle seemingly faced little more than poverty and declining health over the course of most of her remaining years. Although the pervasive structures of White supremacy of course historically existed and presently persist in the American fine arts industry and its society as a whole, and both women shared proximity to Japanese American-ness and its unique relationship with internment, pre- and postwar intersectional disadvantages still became significant contributors to Estelle Ishigo’s professional obscurity upon widowhood as compared to Hisako Hibi. The comparison of these two case studies, while not indicative of strongly causal or correlated societal factors in career outcomes for American and Asian American artists, demonstrates the need and potential for the contemporary Asian American movement to include and spotlight the diversity of experiences that exist within its broader socio-political context and community.

Works Cited

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. “New Collections: Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo ‘George’ Hibi Papers.” AAA Blog, Smithsonian Institution, 20 July 2023, aaa.si.edu/blog/2023/07/new-collections-hisako-hibi-and-matsusaburo-george-hibi-papers.

“Art Student League, Heart Mountain, Wyo.” Ishigo (Estelle) Papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, Calisphere, calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb4f59p1r6/.

“A Baseball Game.” Ishigo (Estelle) Papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, Calisphere, calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb7199p4f9/.

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“Buddhist Shrine.” Ishigo (Estelle) Papers, UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, Calisphere, calisphere.org/item/ark:/13030/hb9k4012nf/.

Creef, Elena Tajima. “The Gendering of Historical Trauma in Internment-Camp Documentary: The Case of Steven Okazaki’s Days of Waiting.” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, edited by Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu, Temple University Press, 2000.

Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo. Directed by Steven Okazaki, Mouchette Films, 1990.

Densho Encyclopedia. “George Matsusaburo Hibi.” Densho Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.densho.org/George_Matsusaburo_Hibi/.

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“Subject Files: Tanforan and Topaz Art School, circa 1944–1945, 2016.” Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo George Hibi Papers, series 1, box 1, folder 13, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, aaa.si.edu/collections/hisako-hibi-and-matsusaburo-george-hibi-papers-22180/series-1/box-1-folder-13.

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“Subject Files: Topaz Art School Exhibition Catalogues and Guestbook, circa 1945.” Hisako Hibi and Matsusaburo George Hibi Papers, series 1, box 1, folder 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, aaa.si.edu/collections/hisako-hibi-and-matsusaburo-george-hibi-papers-22180/series-1/box-1-folder-14.

Wyoming Public Media. “Artwork From Japanese-American Internment Camp Returns Home.” Wyoming Public Media, 2018.