Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009

Program pays tribute to friendship of artist and photographer

ST. LOUIS -- In the 1930s, celebrated photographer Ansel Adams developed a friendship with California painter Chiura Obata.

Just a short time later, World War II would set these two artists on radically different roads to the now-infamous "war relocation centers," in which the U.S. government forcibly interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans.

On Friday, their sons -- Michael Adams and Gyo Obata -- will examine the impact of that internment on their families during a talk at 6 p.m. in Steinberg Hall at Washington University.

The program is being held in conjunction with the exhibition "A Challenge to Democracy: Ethnic Profiling of Japanese Americans During World War II" on view in the Teaching Gallery of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. A reception will follow the talk from 7 to 9 p.m.

Michael Adams, an alumnus of the Washington University School of Medicine, was born and raised in the Yosemite Valley, the subject of many of his father's most famous photos. His parents ran a small gallery that showed paintings and prints of the park by Chiura Obata. The two men not only taught classes through the gallery, but also camped together with their families in Yosemite.

When the United States entered the war, Gyo Obata had just begun classes at the University of California, Berkeley. However, to avoid internment, he transferred to Washington University's School of Architecture, which, as an inland institution, was allowed to accept Japanese-American students.

"I left Berkeley the night before my whole family was interned," Obata said, adding that had the telegram announcing his acceptance arrived one day later, "I'd have been sent to the camps, too."

Instead, Obata finished his education in St. Louis. In 1955, he joined with fellow architecture alumni George Hellmuth and George Kassabaum to form Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, a St. Louis-based firm that remains one of the largest in the world.

While Gyo was enjoying the freedom of a college education here, the rest of his family was sent first to the Tanforan detention center and then the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. There, Chiura Obata did what he could to make life tolerable: He established an art school.

At the same time, Ansel Adams used his camera not for the beauty of nature but for the ugliness of detention, pictures he later published in his book "Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center in Inyo County, California."

"We, as citizens, can agitate for tolerance and fair play, but our agitation must be dynamic and persistent," Adams wrote in his accompanying essay. "It is easy for a 'fair-weather lover of the Constitution' to 'favor' tolerance, and mouth the principles of democracy, but it is quite another thing to stand up against opposition and fight for principles."

It's a message that bears repeating today, says Dr. Ira Kodner, director of the university's Center for the Study of Ethics & Human Values, which organized the talk and exhibition as part of its semester-long series "Ethnic Profiling: A Challenge to Democracy."

"Events from this past summer -- when grade school children were ejected from a swimming pool in Philadelphia and Harvard Professor (Henry Louis) Gates was arrested at his home -- demonstrate the need for continued vigilance against ethnic and racial profiling in our own time," Kodner said.

The exhibition will include several of Adams' Manzanar photographs along with paintings and artwork by Chiura Obata and other interned Japanese-American artists.

Other events will include an Ansel Adams lecture and slide show by Michael Adams at 2 p.m. Saturday as well as performances of Rick Foster's one-man play "Dust Storm: Art and Survival in a Time of Paranoia" at 8 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday in Steinberg Hall.

Kimi Kodani Hill, Chiura Obata's granddaughter, will discuss the work of her grandfather at 2 p.m. Sunday in the Kemper Art Museum. Hill wrote "Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment," copies of which will be available in the museum bookshop.

All events are free and open to the public. Steinberg Hall and the museum are located adjacent to one another near Forsyth and Skinker boulevards. For more information, call (314) 935-9358 or go to humanvalues.wustl.edu.