Topaz Pilgrimage Reflection
By Camille Daw, Program and Outreach Manager
At Minidoka, artwork offers a powerful opportunity to explore a past that many of us never lived, through drawings, paintings, and sculptures documenting their realities. Today, Minidoka National Historic Site is the home of many art pieces such as Roger Shimomura’s Nisei Trilogy or Marie Okuma’s hanafuda cards.
Attending the Topaz Art Pilgrimage gave me the opportunity to learn more about Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes in the San Francisco Bay Area of California and incarcerated at Topaz concentration camp during World War II. This pilgrimage specifically focused on art that was produced by those who were incarcerated at Topaz, before, during, and after World War II.
Located in Delta, Utah, approximately two hours from Salt Lake City, Topaz differs from Minidoka National Historic Site. Topaz was laid out on a grid, seven blocks wide by six blocks length. Four blocks in the center were left empty for the school, but this area was eventually used for recreation space and WRA administration housing. Unlike any of the other nine concentration camps, the majority of land for Topaz was purchased by the federal government from private owners and Millard County, who had obtained land from farmers delinquent on their taxes during the Great Depression. The camp incarcerated over 8,100 Japanese Americans in the high desert of Utah from September 1942 through October 31, 1945.
Block 7 by Setsu Nagata Kanehara, student of Topaz Art School, Courtesy of the Topaz Art Museum
While visiting the site, my tour guide, Kimi Hill, made a point to stop by Block 7 where her grandfather, Chuira Obata, started an Art School for 900 students, offering opportunities for them to document their experience and express their feelings. Born in Japan in 1885, Obata immigrated to the United States in 1906 and became art instructor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1932, he visited Yosemite, where nature captivated his senses, beautifully expressed in his art. This year, the National Park Service released a short film about Obata’s Yosemite which was screened at the pilgrimage. Many of the adults running the Topaz Art School donated or purchased supplies using their own money. Obata and his co-organizer, George Matsusaburo Hibi, felt it was important for people to be able to express themselves. Learning how to paint, draw, and sculpt provided incarcerees the power to document their lives and express their emotions.
Dust Storm, Chiura Obata, Courtesy of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Chiura Obata taught with several other artists, including Miné Okubo, author and illustrator of groundbreaking graphic novel Citizen 13660, which documented her own wartime experiences. Much like Obata, Okubo was well on her way to becoming a world-renowned artist before World War II. Her entire family spent the war separated, with Okubo at Topaz where she devoted most of her time to her artwork. In 1943, one of her pieces won an award at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Courtesy of the Japanese American National Museum
I learned about Miné Okubo at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake. The museum opened a temporary exhibit, Pictures of Belonging featuring Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo, in February 2024. Pilgrimage attendees toured the exhibit, which closes on June 30, and learned from museum curators about the lives and careers of these three different women. Okubo’s cartoonish style depicted realities of life at Topaz, while Issei Hisako Hibi’s swirling pieces explored the fear and constant change that war and incarceration brought to their lives. All three women explored their view of the “American experience,” by taking up space in the world of art.
From Left to Right: Hisako Hibi, Study for a Self-Portrait, Miki Hayakawa, Untitled, Miné Okubo, Portrait Study. Courtesy of the Japanese American National Museum
While incarcerated, Chiura Obata drew inspiration from Dai-Shizen, or “Great Nature,” a philosophical belief he established around the environment’s consistent change and constant state. In thinking about how “Great Nature” connects to Minidoka, I ultimately think of the landscape, historic and contemporary. I am drawn to the words of survivors who describe the dust storms they witnessed after getting off the train, wondering if they will ever see the Puget Sound again. I also reflect on Minidoka National Historic Site today, and the reflecting and healing nature that the never-ending horizon provides. I wonder what Chiura Obata would make of Minidoka National Historic Site – a much different National Park than Yosemite, and the “Great Nature” of the rippling Northside Canal, or the songs of the red-tailed hawk living in the trees of Block 22.
