Internment Paintings Speak The Unspoken

"Kenjiro Nomura: An Artist's View of the Japanese-American Internment," at Washington State Capital Museum, 211 W. 21st Ave.,Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday and Sunday noon-4 p.m. 753-2589. --------------------------------------------------------------- -- OLYMPIA

The latest Kenjiro Nomura exhibit comes 35 years after his death. Unlike his other shows, including the Seattle Art Museum's first one-man exhibit and a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the art in this exhibit was never meant to be shown.

Up until three years ago, the exhibit pieces were wrapped in brown paper and cardboard and stored in a garage.

It was Nomura's son George who stumbled upon the paintings, most of them with oil or watercolor on small sheets of paper rather than canvas. The scenes depicted in his father's paintings were familiar to George: They were scenes from two Japanese-American internment camps that the Nomuras were relocated to during World War II.

Before the paintings were found, no one in the family knew of their existence.

According to June Mukai McKivor, the artist's niece and organizer of the exhibit, the paintings weren't talked about because talking about internment was too painful for the family.

"The subject of internment was never really discussed," McKivor said. "It's similar to victims of the Holocaust not talking about that experience. When I started to do research on internment camps, I asked people from the camps what they remembered and if they could recall or describe certain things. They almost always categorically said, `I don't remember.' "

The exhibit, which premiered last fall at Seattle's Wing Luke Asian Museum, shows an almost photographic representation of the camps and the people in them. At the time that Nomura was taken to Camp Harmony, an internment camp on the Western Washington Fairgrounds in Puyallup, he was still a representational painter.

But very few of his internment camp paintings utilized the blended, dark colors which gave a heavy tone to much of his previous work. As McKivor wrote in a guide to the exhibit, Nomura was "forbidden to depict any unflattering aspects of the internment."

Nomura obtained art supplies from his job as camp sign-painter, and because of his relative isolation in the camp sign shop, he was able to capture scenes from the day-to-day life in both Camp Harmony and the Minidoka Relocation Center near Hunt, Idaho.

Nomura was limited to materials in his sign shop: Only one of the exhibit paintings was done on canvas, which he was able to request at the end of the war. Some of the works are as small as 5 inches by 8 inches. One is rendered in crayon on construction paper.

Although Nomura's work is straightforward and representational, the subjects he chose give a greater insight to what internment was like. "The Main Gate," with the Puyallup Fair's main gate building in the background, shows the fenced-off area and shed where visitors from the outside world could meet with the camp's residents. A military policeman, gun at his side, can be seen leaning against the visiting area's back fence.

"Guard Tower," painted during the winter of 1942-'43, shows a dark and ominous winter sky and a plane of snowy ground broken by a line of barbed wire fence. "The Laundry and Sanitation Building," one of the few exhibit paintings to feature any people, shows a lone woman with a basket walking to the laundry building in a scene heavy with dull browns and greens.

The show, which has toured in Portland, Ore., Colorado and Idaho since the Wing Luke show, has evoked a range of emotional reactions and has conveyed something different to each generation of Japanese-Americans, McKivor said.

The show does more than illustrate life in the internment camps, however; it represents a tragic period in Nomura's life where he was taken away from Seattle and its art community. When the Nomuras returned to Seattle after the war, their family business had been destroyed by the relocation, and Nomura's ailing wife committed suicide in 1946. Nomura did not paint until 1947, when another local Japanese artist, Paul Horiuchi, helped him to recover from his losses and return to art.