“Art embraces so much more than just a painting. Art is grounded fully in culture. I don't think that you can separate it from that, and so it's really kind of almost an indication of what's happening culturally,” said artist Tama Takahashi.
For Takahashi, this means drawing influence from her half-Japanese heritage and the experiences of her grandparents. Her family was incarcerated during World War II in a concentration camp in Minidoka, Idaho. Takahashi’s upcoming art exhibit, Memories of Barbed Wire: Resilience in the Japanese American Community, is an emotional portrayal of the concentration camp in Minidoka used to incarcerate more than 13,000 of the 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned during WWII, including her own family.
“That kind of generational trauma carries forward. It left emotional traces that filtered down through generations,” said Takahashi. “So, my show really taps into that. My photographs are not documentary photos; they're emotional expressions of pain and history that happened at Minidoka and in all the concentration camps. But also with the happy side, which is the resilience of people who went through this and came out the other side.”