Mira Nakashima
JRA Distinguished Artist Series
WENDY MARUYAMA AND MIRA NAKASHIMA
THE TAG PROJECT: EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066
Saturday, April 10th, 2010, 10:00 am to 3:00 pm
Montgomery College
This very special weekend pairs furniture artists Wendy Maruyama from San Diego, California with Mira Nakashima from New Hope, Pennsylvania, and will showcase not only their individual work, but their friendship based in part on their shared heritage as Japanese-Americans who have been deeply affected by the experience of the Internment Camps during the Second World War.
Trained in Furniture Design at the San Diego State University and the Rochester Institute of Technology, Wendy Maruyama has been Professor of Woodworking and Furniture Design at San Diego State University since 1989, and has also worked independently as a designer and maker of contemporary furniture, both commissioned and speculative. Her resume of exhibitions, authored and critical publications, lectures and workshops, awards, and other professional activities within this country and abroad is extraordinary, as is the list of private and public collections that include her work. Her work has been described as “innovative, expressive, and provocative.” In recent years she has been deeply affected by her growing awareness and study of the Internment camps to which all Japanese Americans were relocated during the Second World War. That awareness has informed both her current furniture work, and her interest in making others aware of this unfortunate period in American history through the TAG Project.
The Tag is what the internees were instructed to wear
as they were transported to the camps.
Mira Nakashima-Yarnell, the daughter of renowned furniture maker George Nakashima, has followed in her father’s path by becoming a woodworker. Born in Seattle Seattle, she spent the earliest years of her life with her family in the Minidoka detention camp. It was in that camp that George learned woodworking from a Japanese carpenter, later opening a woodworking studio in New Hope. Mira was educated at Harvard University, and received a Masters degree in Architecture from Waseda University in Tokyo. She worked with her father for many years as a colleague and designer in his workshop, and since his death, she has been the creative director of the Nakashima studio in New Hope, Pennsylvania. She continues to produce her father’s famous furniture designs, and to expand on his work with designs of her own with more angularity and curves, but the same appreciation for the natural wood. Her work is informed by her keen appreciation of form, function and design.
In Saturday’s workshop in the form of informal illustrated talks, Wendy and Mira will discuss and show examples of their historical work and the directions they have taken in recent years.
Wendy Maruyama,
Poston, 2008
douglas fir, barbed wire, paper, tar paper
RELATED LECTURE AND SPECIAL EVENT: Wendy and Mira will jointly present a lecture focusing on the impact that the Internment Camps have had on their individual lives and work. This lecture will start at 2:00 pm on Sunday, April 11th in the Grand Salon of the Renwick Gallery.
The Lecture will be followed by a special opportunity to participate in Wendy’s TAG PROJECT: EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066, her effort to create awareness of and memorialize the 120,000 Japanese-American citizens who were interned by creating identification tags similar to those issued to them when they were forced to leave their homes. Small groups all over the country and individuals have been assisting Wendy in the completion of this project.