The Seed and the Story: The “Art of Living” Exhibit

Rohwer Camp #23, Artist Unknown. From the Butler Center webpage.

The Seed and the Story column is published every other Wednesday in The Post Dispatch and syndicated on Sundays in the Courier.  If you enjoy these pieces please support this, or your own, small town paper.

A few weeks ago I attended the opening of the exhibit “The Art of Living: Japanese American Creative Experience at Rohwer.” A collection of woodworking pieces, paintings, and even fashion designs, the exhibit is a testament to the tenacity of human creativity, especially in the face of injustice. Created by people living at Japanese internment camps, these pieces of art were fashioned from found objects such as empty soup cans, scrap lumber, brown paper sacks, even pieces of electrical wire. With material that would seem like trash in most other circumstances, camp artists created jewelry, hand-bound books, and intricately carved bird pins. Many of these objects are now on display at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in downtown Little Rock.

You’ve most likely heard about the Japanese Internment Camps. After Pearl Harbor the U.S. military, concerned that Japanese Americans might pose a security threat, rounded up some 110,000 citizens and sent them to isolated areas in the southern and western United States. Allowed to bring only what they could carry, these Americans, mostly from the west coast, were uprooted from their homes, businesses, and universities and treated as prisoners. They were forced into barrack-like housing in heavily wooded areas that were formerly uninhabited, places where, the government stated, they could not pose a potential military threat. Taken from their communities where they served as civic leaders, business owners and university students, they were robbed of independence, privacy, and property and made to wait in line for everything from meals to showers.

Rohwer, located in Desha County in south Arkansas, was one of two such camps in Arkansas. It’s known for sending several hundred men to the Army’s 442^nd Regimental Combat team, one of the most decorated combat units of the war. The other Arkansas camp was Jerome, located in both Chicot and Drew counties. This collection from the Rohwer camp survives thanks to the late Mabel Rose Jamison Vogel, a high school art teacher at the camp who saved documents and photos from her students as well as countless pieces of artwork created by both the old and young. The diversity of the collection is fascinating. Objects range from posters supporting the war effort to handwritten biographies, portraits of tiny children and aging women to intricately-detailed pieces of furniture that blend Japanese aesthetics with local material.

The exhibit allows space for the viewer to reflect upon the injustices that we humans inflict on one another, especially when acting out of fear. It also provides space to contemplate the perpetual desire of the human spirit to create beauty whenever and however we can, especially amid great difficulty. I can’t begin to do justice to the power of these pieces or the breadth of the collection in the space of this short column. If you head down to Little Rock be sure take time to stop in to the Butler Center located in the river market. The exhibit will be on display through November 26 and is free and open to everyone. Free guided tours are available upon request by calling 501-320-5793. The Butler Center is open Monday-Saturday 9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. You can visit the center online, as well as find out more about the “Art of Living” exhibit, at www.butlercenter.org.

Related Posts

• “The Many Variations of the Arkansas Tattoo” in the Arkansas Times
• Arkansas Tattoo Project Update: Visiting the Parlor in Rose City/North Little Rock.
• Arkansas Tattoo Project Update
• A Few New Tattoo Photos from the Us Tattooed Kids: Arkansas Project
• Dardanelle Post Office Mural and Arkansas Post Office Mural Project