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Social Sharing
Barracks
Not on view
Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Prompted by government fears of espionage, the order authorized the forcible removal of more than 110,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry and residents of Japanese nationality from their homes on the West Coast. Rather than an anomaly, Executive Order 9066 was perhaps the most egregious moment in the United States’ long history of racist anti-Asian policies.
Japanese American families were sent to one of ten internment camps, or “war relocation centers.” There they were confronted with barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, and armed guards, housed in uninsulated barracks, and forced to share communal mess halls, showers, and bathrooms. Despite these conditions, the camp at Topaz, Utah, had a thriving art program. Taneyuki (Dan) Harada’s enigmatic view of the camp, devoid of any of the nine thousand internees, visualizes both its physical isolation in the desert and the psychological alienation brought on through unjust detention.
- Artist
- Taneyuki (Dan) Harada
- Title
- Barracks
- Date
- 1944
- Object Type
- Painting
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase, Mildred L. Landstrom Trust Fund
- Accession Number
- 1996.117