From DiscoverNikkei.org
Masumi Hayashi
Photographer (1945-2006)
Masumi Hayashi was born in the Gila River, Arizona concentration camp in 1945 and raised in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Throughout her adolescence, she worked at her parents’ store, Village Market, on Compton Avenue. She graduated from Jordan High School and attended UCLA before marrying a naval officer during the Vietnam War. She frequently moved during this period and had a son while living in Guam.
Now professor of photography at Cleveland State University, Ohio, Hayashi received a Master of Fine Arts from Florida State University. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Tokyo Museum of Photography, and the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art in London. She has an extensive exhibition history, including recent shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany; the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center in Portland, Oregon; and the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York.
Hayashi was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2003 for work in India and Nepal. In addition, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, Florida Arts Council, Cleveland Visual Arts Award, and a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund research grant. Her photographs have been widely published in significant journals and magazines including DoubleTake, Aperture, See, and Mother Jones.
- Virtual gallery with comprehensive documentation of Hayashi's oeuvre, including her most recent work photographing Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain temples ni Asia. Gallery 2 focuses on Hayashi's earlier photo collages of Japanese American internment camps and internees.
- Introduction: "This website ... hosts Professor Hayashi's creative research that deals with the internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. This project started with Hayashi's panoramic photo collages which show the remnants of sites of Japanese American Internment camps during World War II and were symbolic of an archeological and historical memory. Professor Hayashi interviewed camp survivors in different areas of the United States and Canada which became part of the artwork installation in galleries and museums. She collected photographs taken by these camp survivors when cameras were contraband. Ms. Hayashi's project was a search for a collective memory, having been born in the camps, but having no memories of the camps. It was also a personal pilgrimage. These voices, photo collages, and snapshots have become a project that resonates today as we observe our history today."
- Exhibition: "Sights Unseen: The Photographic Constructions of Masumi Hayashi" (Los Angeles, Japanese American National Museum, May 31-September 14, 2003)
- "Panoramic Photo Collages of Prisons"; published in XConnect #7 (May 1997).
- Exhibition: "Masumi Hayashi: The Sacred and the Sublime" (Los Angeles, White Room Gallery, July 10-August 16, 2003)
- Last updated on November 29, 2005