This is a portrait of a young Japanese American woman presented from the chest up. Her dark hair has tendrils framing her face and some loose strands falling to her shoulders rendered with loose, expressive brushstrokes. Her skin tone is light with a subtle blush on her cheeks. Her expression is calm, her eyes directed slightly upward and to our right. Her lips are painted a bold, reddish-orange. She is wearing a collared shirt with a loosely-woven, plaid pattern in muted colors— primarily shades of grey, burgundy, and muted reddish-orange. The plaid pattern is not precisely uniform; the brushwork suggests a certain casualness in the texture of the fabric. The background is a very pale, almost off-white, and deliberately understated, focusing our attention entirely on the woman. Anti-Japanese racism in America following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by imperial Japan resulted in one of the nation’s most regrettable chapters. Under the guise of “national security,” roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans, 79,000 of them U.S. citizens, were identified by the government, given 6 days to put their affairs in order – sell houses, close businesses, contact family – collect what few possessions they could carry, then sent to remote military zones, mostly across the Western U.S. Anyone at least 1/16th Japanese was taken. Officially termed “relocation centers,” the prisoners were held in concentration camps full of innocent civilians with no charges made against them and held against their will, indefinitely, in miserable conditions, behind barbed wire and under armed guard. One of these camps was known as Amache, near Granada, CO, 220 miles southeast of Denver. One of the prisoners there was the Japanese-born American artist Tokio Ueyama … and another was this unidentified young woman who posed for this memorable oil portrait on January 17, 1944 at camp Amache.

Untitled (Amache Portrait) by Tokio Ueyama (Japanese American) - Oil on canvas / January 17, 1944 - Denver Art Museum (Colorado) #WomenInArt #art #artwork #TokioUeyama #Ueyama #portraitofaWoman #JapaneseAmericanArt #DenverArtMuseum #BlueskyArt #JapaneseAmerican #artText #JapaneseAmericanArtist

Japanese American artist Tokio Ueyama’s 1942 portrait of a woman in long blue dress reclining in wood frame folding chair as she crochets in front of a doorway opening out to a sunlit exterior depicts his spouse Suye Ueyama during the imprisonment of Americans with Japanese ancestry by the United States throughout World War II. The sunlight through open curtained doorway provides natural lighting for the woman as she looks down at her crocheting, facing left. Her hair is pulled back neatly at the back of her head. She wears white sandals over dark socks. A ball of yarn sits in a basket near her feet, next to a make-shift table with a tin cup and a black handled pot on the right. A pair of sandals rests on doorframe. Shade from the barracks extends a short distance outside with a partial view of one building in direct sunlight to the left and a row of three barracks in distance. This painting depicts the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Arcadia, California constructed at the legendary horse track, where thousands of Japanese-Americans stayed before being transferred to incarceration camps. It may appear to be a gentle and serene scene, but the barracks and the dry inhospitable earth remind us that it was not her choice to be there. In 1941, Tokio and Suye were among the 120,000 Japanese people in the U.S. who were deemed, without cause, as dangers to the country and forced into makeshift prisons. They were “forcibly removed from their home in southern California and sent to the Granada Relocation Center, now known as the Amache National Historic Site, in southeast Colorado.” More than 10,000 people were unconstitutionally incarcerated at Amache in the following years, making it the tenth largest "city" in Colorado at the time. Despite the upheaval and, no doubt, the trauma, Ueyama continued to paint. He captured scenes of the camp and its surroundings and inhabitants while also teaching adult art classes in Block 7E to about 150 students.

The Evacuee (Suye Ueyama) in Kimono" by Tokio Ueyama (American, born in Japan) - Oil on canvas / 1942 - Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, California) #womeninart #janm #tokioueyama #art #japaneseamerican #oilpainting #womensart #portraitofawoman #japaneseamericanart #fineart #history

🌿 Explore the Denver Art Museum & the Petrie Institute of Western American Art's engaging symposium, "Art as Agency: Crafting Beauty at Amache and Beyond," happening next Friday, Jan 24!

Discover more here!

➡️ https://buff.ly/3Whn6Fi

#denverartmuseum
#TokioUeyama #Asianart⁠

Suye Ueyama painted by her husband. She is holding a small folded fan and stares forward with her dark hair pulled back, standing on a floral patterned carpet while wearing a black Japanese-style kimono with a peacock and flowers on lower half of kimono and a patterned obi around chest area.

Mrs. Ueyama (Suye Ueyama) in Kimono" by Tokio Ueyama (American, born in Japan) - Oil on canvas / 1929 - Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles, California) #art #womeninart #janm #painting #tokioueyama #kimono #japaneseamerican #oilpainting #femaleportrait