Darryl Mori

“Algunos creen que mi obra parece que está diciendo algo, como un megáfono”, dice Shinpei Takeda. “Y otros creen que está tratando de atrapar algo, como una red. Completamente diferente. Pero me gusta que pueda ser ambas cosas”.

Para Takeda, resolver perspectivas dispares no es nada nuevo. Es un artista visual y cineasta que trabaja con una gran diversidad de medios como película, fotografía, sonido, actuación, pintura, fibra y caligrafía. Valora la variedad.

Pero Takeda ofrece además un punto de vista peculiar acerca de la amplitud de las diferentes culturas del mundo. Nacido en ...

“Aunque desde muy lejos, yo siempre me he sentido cerca del museo”, dice  el Dr. G.W. (Greg) Kimura, nuevo Presidente y Director Ejecutivo del Museo Nacional Japonés Americano.”

“He sido miembro y afiliado del museo por años. Mi familia insiste en venir aquí cada vez que estamos en la zona, lo que ha sido por lo menos una vez al año. Una visita al museo es especial. Es como una peregrinación. Yo me siento reconfortado de ver la historia de la comunidad contada en tan hermoso lugar. Yo siempre he estado conmovido, realmente movido emocionalmente ...

“You could feel everyone in the park staring,” Alan Nakagawa says. “Why do they get to go in the Dome? It was like being a goldfish in a goldfish bowl. However, the moment we were inside, having only an hour of access, we went straight to work.”

The Los Angeles native recalls the day he and videographer Tom Clancey walked into the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Japan. The iconic structure, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the half-destroyed ruin of a building near the detonation point of the atomic bomb dropped on the city on August 6, 1945.

Nakagawa ...

“Growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, we were subjected to stereotypical portraits or invisibility,” Eddie Wong recalls. “We knew we could make a difference by providing an alternative in the form of books, photo exhibits, and eventually films and video.”

Wong, together with colleagues Duane Kubo, Robert (Bob) Nakamura and Alan Ohashi, started Visual Communications (VC) in 1970—a pioneering nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists.

In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of VC’s founding, VC collaborated with the Japanese American National Museum on the exhibition, At First Light ...

“The faces from the photographs staring up at me as I searched for my family in the National Archives have always haunted me,” Paul Kitagaki Jr., recalls. “I wanted to know the story behind the faces and discover how they survived and created a new life after the war.”

The noted photographer and videographer—a Sansei whose work has been honored with dozens of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize—had family members who had been unjustly incarcerated in American concentration camps during World War II.

“I learned of Executive Order 9066 in my 10th grade history class in 1970,” Kitagaki ...