Miné Okubo, “Grocer Weighing Produce,” 1940, tempera on hardboard, 43.5 x 39 in. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.

On first sight, the painting rings like a chime that echoes through the memory of art. The presence nearby of two more works from the same time and place confirms that the painter surely knew of and appreciated the great Mexican muralists, including Diego Rivera (once Mexico’s foremost internationally admired artist, though today increasing known as the husband of the far more better known and loved Frida Kahlo). There appear to be nine adults here, but their bodies are pressed together so tightly they become a single block of fabrics and faces, eight of them watching the ninth like hawks, their broad hands making revealing gestures as if their lives depended on him. He is the Grocer, and for almost 20 years, through the Great Depression and the Second World War, when food was scarce and money scarcer, shopping was an activity demanding such close scrutiny. Although the figures are three-dimensional, indeed sculptural, they occupy the shallowest of spaces, squeezing almost as close to the front of the canvas as they are to each other.

Miné Okubo painted “Grocer Weighing Produce” in 1940, two years before she would be sent to the Central Utah Relocation Center, euphemistically known as Topaz, where despite being a natural-born US citizen, she would remain for the duration of the war between the US and Japan. According to the photo next to it, she painted “Grocer” sitting on her studio floor while a student at Berkeley, still working in the Japanese manner she must have learned from her parents, who had emigrated to California a few years before her birth. The clue that unlocks her influences is that she had traveled to France and studied, briefly, with the protean Fernand Léger, who had created his own version of Cubism and often painted in a way that resembled the heavy outlines, static figures, and flat space of stained glass. It may have been he who introduced her to Rivera, along with the satirist José Clemente Orozco and other Mexican modernists who also imbibed Cubism at the source. This mixture of national influences during a world war testifies to the challenge of forging an identity in the modern age, and the advantages to artists, who almost universally must create their own.

A patron examines works in Pictures of Belonging at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Image courtesy the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.

There are over a hundred works of art in Pictures of Belonging, a major exhibition of the art and lives of three Japanese American artists that is making the first stop on its tour at the UMFA. The decision to begin here was made in part because two of the artists were incarcerated at the nearby “Topaz” internment camp, but in fact there is a deeper, more subtle connection at play here. Japanese immigrants to the United States experienced an Exclusion Era from 1882 until 1965, so that they, along with African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Latter-day Saints, loom large among the small number of groups that were at one time or another legally prohibited from remaining somewhere in America.

A particular skill of Okubo’s allowed her to capture her experience in the desolate and ill-equipped conditions at the camp, where she compiled remarkably facile drawings, rather than mere sketches, in a notebook. Usually, such artifacts are difficult to see due to their fragile natures, and viewers must be content to view a book open to one or two pages. Okubo’s journal is shown in this way, in a vitrine, but a nearby digital tablet also shows the drawings sequentially. Anyone interested enough to budget a few extra minutes to watch this display will encounter the Japanese-American experience of the war in far greater visual detail than has been available before now. We can also hope that future exhibitions including sketchbooks, artist’s books, and other bound volumes will include this approach.

Digital representation of work from Miné Okubo’s sketchbook. Image credit: Geoff Wichert

A very different depiction of the world is found in the paintings of Hisako Hibi. Where Okubo’s world is solid, even when as flat as the “Boy With Fish,” Hibi’s is comprised almost entirely of light. Two of her canvases here, “Eternal Seasons” and “Autumn,” depict feelings about and responses to seasonal nature, an approach that achieves a climax in a third, “Poems by Madame Takeko,” in which the characters appear to float over an image of nature witnessed by two small figures in the foreground, like a Sumi-e calligraphic scroll, but in color rather than brushed in ink.

A fourth painting, “War and Suffering,” reads like the bowels of a tornado in which figures holding their faces in their hands, fires, silhouettes of buildings, ghosts, and incoherent moans swirl and fly about. In “Construction,” the closest the artist comes to depicting deep space, atmosphere-like smoke obscures the distance. In all these works, and even more so in the artist’s comments, Buddhist beliefs come to the fore. Contrary to many spiritual systems, Buddhism foregrounds the real world, but cautions against becoming attached to transient things, and focuses on detaching from them rather than being caught up in their pursuit. In Hibi’s “Self-Portrait,” the suffering brought on by war is written clearly on her face, while the objects that surround her are ephemeral; the title card says this is a preparatory study, but it may have felt complete to her. In one of her comments, she recalls that the world war was supposed to end war, but observes how war continues instead. This neutral view, replacing tension and resolution with unchanging continuity, permeates her painting.

Hisako Hibi, “Morning,” 1942, oil on canvas. Image credit: Geoff Wichert

Hisako Hibi, “War and Suffering,” 1982, oil on canvas, 35×42 in. Image credit: Geoff Wichert

So it’s worth noting that Hisako Hibi’s paintings of Topaz focus on one of the most transient human experiences: the sky. Her camp landscapes, with sunrise and sunset bounded by angular mountains and rows of anonymous buildings, record the ugliness of circumstances set against the ever-refreshing beauty of nature. Prior to the war, she had struggled to reconcile the residue of her Impressionist training with her own sense of how to paint. These paintings of the sky recall Turner’s watercolors of the burning of the Houses of Parliament, which forced the British painter to surrender his sense of control. The academic still-lifes Hibi was making before the war similarly gave way after to a luminous and nebulous, visionary new style.

In any identifiable group of artists, there will be one or more who are seen in retrospect to have made more astute choices than their peers. Pictures of Belonging gives subtle preference to the work of such a figure, Miki Hayakawa, whose trajectory more closely paralleled that of more familiar artists of her time. While her choice to leave California, then as now the home of America’s largest Japanese-American community, was anything but voluntary, her decision to abandon the coast, where she would surely have risked relocation, and move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, not only promised she could remain free, but landed her in a “creative arts hotbed,” as Santa Fe is described by its tourist bureau.

On the one hand, there will always be those who believe that the suffering artists are so often dealt by circumstances contributes to their eventual success, while on the other there can be little doubt that relocation damaged both Okubo’s and Hibi’s careers. A more sophisticated observer might argue for more nuanced impacts, especially over time. To be sure, Hayakawa’s choice of subjects avoided controversy while focusing on many of the same things as other artists were turning to. For instance, at a time when portraits were beginning to be exalted as fine art, the psychological insight displayed in her “Portrait of a Young Man” compares favorably to the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston, both of whom were active in the same places and times.

Miki Hayakawa, “Portrait of a Young Man”

Miki Hayakawa, “From My Window,” 1935, oil on canvas, 28 x 28 in. Collection of Sandra & Bram Dijkstra on loan at the Huntington Library and Museum

There can be little doubt that the lack of demonstrated, external stress acting on Hayakawa’s subjects allowed her to develop and share the sensitive technique that shows so strongly in “Boy Sawing” and “Young Man Playing Ukulele.” “Artists should live beautiful and colorful and rich lives—not with constant jealousy and ugliness—it will ruin the paintings” says her statement, echoing Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated opinion. Yet on the other hand, it seems to this viewer that more than 80 years later, Miné Okubo’s untitled images of life in the camp, one showing a mother and child, presumably her and her daughter, trapped behind barbed wire, and the other, depicting subjects squeezed into a room so small neither adult can stand up straight, speak truths about the lives lived by the less fortunate, both then and now, that were unknown to Hayakawa.

What’s on the walls at UMFA is uneven at times, not least because so much of the art of these three women has been lost, sometimes deliberately, and their reputations forgotten, but also because in their desire to tell the whole story, the curators have included invaluable archival materials that won’t interest viewers equally. Many will find Miki Hayakawa’s splendid art easiest to approach. Others may find Hisako Hibi’s upfront brushwork more to their liking. I’m afraid I’ve already given away my fondness for Miné Okubo’s aesthetic responsiveness to events in her immediate surroundings. The UMFA is not without its Japanese treasures, some added recently. But right now, between Pictures of Belonging here and Spain and the Hispanic World at BYU, Utahns have two great options for a visual adventure that begins locally and leads on to places we should probably get to know better.

Miné Okubo’s untitled images of life in Topaz internment camp in Utah. Image credit: Geoff Wichert

Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, through June 30.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.