Photograph by Paul Faris
Preschoolers play under sunflowers planted near barracks windows.
When visitors see “Beauty in a War Torn World,” a new exhibition at Memphis Botanic Garden this month, they will glimpse a piece of Mid-South history that may come as a surprise — the existence of two Japanese-American internment camps that operated in Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas, during World War II.
The photographs and artwork on display March 5-31 at Memphis Botanic Garden offer a two-fold purpose. One collection features approximately 30 black-and-white photographs taken from 1942 to 1945 by professor Paul Faris (1905-1989) that capture camp life at the Rohwer Relocation Center and the Japanese Americans who produced artwork while incarcerated there.
The second collection highlights the intricate watercolors, letters, diaries, and furniture designs created by Memphian Floy Hanson (1878-1951). This talented artist’s sophisticated knowledge of Japanese art helped facilitate an exhibition at Hendrix College in 1944 by one of the incarcarees, Japanese painter Henry Sugimoto.
The current show is curated by Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, a history professor at Arkansas State University who has been researching the lives of Faris and Hanson and the Japanese. “My aim is to shine a light on their work,” says Freeman.
exhibit origins
Photograph by Paul Faris
The 442nd Regiment of the Army, which was largely Japanese American, trained at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, so it was relatively easy for those young men to visit their relatives in the Arkansas camps. When Paul Faris documented camp life at Rohwer in 1945, he captured this scene of a soldier on leave meeting his daughter for the first time.
When Freeman initially met with Mary Ann (Faris) Thurmond and Eliot (Tim) Faris several years ago, they presented a huge, well-documented collection of negatives. Thousands of photographs had been taken by their father, Paul Faris, a professor of English and photography at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, where he worked from 1928 until his retirement in 1971.
“Our father taught photography, so he was always developing pictures at the house,” says Thurmond. “His darkroom was really the heart of our home.”
His photographs largely depicted rural life in Arkansas: landscapes, cotton production, homestead cabins, and craftsmen, as well as newsworthy events at the college. Some work was even published nationally by Life magazine and The New York Times. When Freeman encountered the 100+ images Faris shot in July 1945 during a visit to the Rohwer Relocation Center, however, she recognized their historic significance. The material was strengthened by the oral histories his wife, Ann Faris, wrote about each resident they photographed.
Of particular interest to Professor Freeman was a picture that featured Henry Sugimoto encircled by several faculty members. In the center was a handsome, self-possessed woman. Who was she? Freeman wondered. This was her introduction to Floy Hanson, a gallery director at Hendrix College during the 1940s, whose expertise in Japanese art helped to bring Sugimoto and his work to the college.
To understand the audacity of such an invitation, however, one must know something about the climate of the internment period.
The internment camps of Arkansas
Photograph By Paul Faris
This picture of the cemetery at Rohwer includes two memorial monuments built by camp inmates to honor the fallen soldiers of the 442nd Regiment and 100th Infantry Battalion, the majority of whom were of Japanese ancestry. Much changed at the camps between 1943 and 1945. The guards eventually left and the barbed wire that encircled the camp came down. Many internees transferred to Rohwer once Jerome closed in June 1944 and were allowed to go to work or study in Chicago, though they were prohibited from returning to the West Coast.
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal “of all people from military areas.” Fueled by decades of racial intolerance and worry about national security, a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria crested in the spring of 1942. Since 80 percent of the Japanese lived on the West Coast, the region was declared a military area, forcing the incarceration of Japanese Americans residing there, many of whom were U.S. citizens.
Government notices began appearing in Japanese neighborhoods ordering residents to report to assembly centers. Some received less than two weeks’ notice as they scrambled to get their personal affairs in order, leaving behind homes, farms, and treasured keepsakes they would never see again. Parents arrived with children in tow, carrying but a single suitcase, uncertain of what the future held.
Through that summer and fall, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to internment camps built by the U.S. military. Most were in the West, but two camps were located in the Delta, at Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas (110 miles southeast of Little Rock).
Army barracks were hastily assembled at the sites, eventually housing some 16,000 Japanese Americans from September 18, 1942, to November 30, 1945. Upon arriving, families were settled in empty barracks, given a single room “apartment,” and issued one cot per person, three blankets, and a pot-bellied stove.
Theirs was a life interrupted.
Shining a light on injustice
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Photograph By Paul Faris
Henry Sugimoto created this piece while incarcerated at Jerome in 1943. The picture was among the 15 works Sugimoto showed at Hendrix College in February 1944. The individual family barracks were heated by pot-bellied stoves, making the chopping and hauling of wood a daily chore in winter. The painting features Henry and his wife, Susie, with their 6-year-0ld daughter, Madeleine.
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Photograph By Paul Faris
This picture by Faris was taken during Henry Sugimoto’s exhibition at Hendrix College in February 1944. In the background is the artist’s painting, Arrival at Jerome. Pictured left to right: Louise Freund, Susie Tagawa (Sugimoto’s wife), Floy Hanson, Elsie Freund, and Henry Sugimoto. It was this image that prompted historian Sarah Freeman to learn more about Floy Hanson. Hanson was teaching arts and crafts and curating exhibitions from the collection she and Jessie Clough had spent years developing. While at Hendrix, she and Elsie Freund traveled to Jerome and arranged for Sugimoto to show his work. Hendrix College purchased this painting, which now hangs in the Mills Center.
The building of the internment camps made headlines in Arkansas and sparked conversation at Hendrix College, a private, liberal arts school where several art faculty decided to visit Jerome in 1943. There, Floy Hanson and Elsie Freund met Henry Sugimoto, an artist who had been trained and shown in California and France. Sugimoto was interned at Jerome (and later Rohwer) with his wife, Susie, and 6-year-old daughter, Sumile Madeleine.
In an unpublished manuscript, Ann Faris wrote, “When Henry Sugimoto realized there would be minimal photographic record of the Japanese American internment experience, he changed his artistic style and began in secret to create what he called “documentary paintings” — works that depicted incarceration from a resident’s point of view.”
Though he worried that his artwork would be considered subversive, camp administrators granted permission for him to continue. When Hanson and Freund saw the paintings, they, too, encouraged him.
At the college’s invitation, Sugimoto and his family traveled to Hendrix in February 1944, where he showed 15 works. Faris photographed the event, and Hendrix purchased one painting, Arrival at Jerome, a beautiful portrait which still hangs at the school today.
The Farises later traveled to Rohwer in July 1945, on assignment for folk art expert Allen H. Eaton. The author was gathering material for his book, Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps (Harper & Brothers, 1952). With Sugimoto as his guide, the couple attended an arts exhibition at the camp and stayed several days, capturing the range of traditional arts being produced at Rohwer. The spartan conditions made waste unthinkable, and items such as gunnysacks and cardboard were recycled into things of beauty. The creation of art brought balance and peace.
Faris’ photographs, which are artfully lit and well-produced, show Japanese doing ikebana, a spiritual form of flower arranging; kobu, the collection and burnishing of unusually shaped cypress knees; calligraphy, sculpture, and wood carving. As Paul shot, his wife, Ann, who did feature writing for the Arkansas Gazette, took oral histories from the residents, providing details about their lives and how they coped with internment and loss. Some of their work was published in Eaton’s book.
Mary Ann and Tim consider their parents quiet activists, doing what they could to shine a light on intolerance and injustice. “Mom and Dad’s arms were always open,” says Thurmond. Living with those photographs, many of which decorate her home, Thurmond is reminded of how the Japanese Americans “created a life of creativity and joy in the midst of a terrible thing that had been done to them.”
Japanese-American author Delphine Hirasuna refers to this as “the art of gaman” — the patient endurance of the unbearable.
Examining the work of Floy Hanson
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Courtesy of the Archives at Rhodes College
Dresser and Clear Vace
As Floy Hanson and Jessie Clough traveled the world in the 1920s and 1930s, they painted and sketched in small sketchbooks. Hanson in particular had a great interest in the roles and the work of women in the world’s cultures. She was also very interested in indigenous uses of cotton as she had spent some of her childhood in the Mississippi Delta. Today, their work forms the basis for the collection of the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College.
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Courtesy of the Archives at Rhodes College
Women and Cotton
As Floy Hanson and Jessie Clough traveled the world in the 1920s and 1930s, they painted and sketched in small sketchbooks. Hanson in particular had a great interest in the roles and the work of women in the world’s cultures. She was also very interested in indigenous uses of cotton as she had spent some of her childhood in the Mississippi Delta. Today, their work forms the basis for the collection of the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College.
As a highly trained visual artist, Floy Hanson spent time studying and living in New York City and Kyoto, Japan, before eventually joining Hendrix College in 1940. What a shock the war and internment must have been to her.
Hanson was part of a coterie of college-educated women during the early twentieth century in the Mid-South that included educator Mary Grimes Hutchison (the founder of Hutchison School), Nan Halliburton (the mother of travel writer Richard Halliburton), art instructor Jessie Clough, and Floy’s sister, musician Etta Hanson. Lovers of art and culture and travel, their knowledge of the world would have been decidedly broader than most of their era.
Hanson met her mentor and lifelong collaborator, Jessie Clough, at the esteemed college preparatory for young ladies, The Higbee School, where Clough taught art. Hanson graduated as Higbee’s valedictorian in 1897. She continued her education at Chicago Institute of Art and Columbia University Teachers College, where she was heavily influenced by Arthur Dow, a leading figure in the pre-World War I Arts and Crafts revival.
Dow’s emphasis on Japanese-inspired appreciation of nature and the notion that art should be both pictorial and decorative would shape Hanson’s work. While in New York during the teens and 1920s, she designed handsome wood furniture with Jessie “overseeing the construction of textiles for Floy’s couches and chairs,” notes Bill Short, associate director of Barret Library at Rhodes College, where Hanson’s work now resides.
Pictures of her furniture designs and watercolor paintings shown in the exhibit belie her aesthetic. Expertly crafted, her symmetrical designs reference nature themes in a muted palette of greens, ocre, and mauve.
Ultimately, Floy and Clough assembled an 1,100-piece collection they used to study and teach art and design that included Italian and French brocades from the eighteenth century, Japanese woodblock prints, lacquerwork, obi textiles, and other objects from foreign lands. In 1950, Floy established the Jessie L. Clough Art Memorial for Teaching at Rhodes College, creating a trust in honor of her mentor. The collection is still in use today as a teaching tool for the arts and humanities. Short plans to reorganize the collection with information Freeman’s research is bringing to light.
To learn more, visit densho.org, a clearinghouse on the 10 Japanese-American internment camps in the United States.
