The Other American Moderns: Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa 9780271080727

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THE OTHER AMERICAN MODERNS

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THE OTHER AMERICAN MODERNS Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa

ShiPu Wang Penn State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania

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A shorter version of chapter 1 appeared as an essay in

This publication has been made possible through support

Trans Asia Photography Review 5, no. 1 (2014), http://hdl.

from the Terra Foundation for American Art International

handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0005.103. A shorter version

Publication Program of the College Art Association.

of the chapter 2 appeared in American Studies 51, no. 3/4 (2012): 7–30. A shorter version of chapter 3 appeared in a special section on “Discrepant Modernism” in American Art 30, no. 1 (2016): 16–20.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Additional credits: page ii, Frank Matsura, Matsura and Norma Dillabough Studio Portraits, ca. 1910, detail (fig. 2);

Names: Wang, ShiPu, author.

v, Hideo Noda, Shoeshine Man of New York, 1936, detail

Title: The other American moderns : Matsura, Ishigaki,

(fig. 58); vi, detail of Miki Hayakawa’s solo exhibition at

Noda, Hayakawa / ShiPu Wang. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : Penn State

the New Mexico Museum of Art, 1944 (fig. 71); 68, Hideo Noda, Scottsboro Boys (Alabama), 1933, detail (fig. 47).

University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the works of four early to midtwentieth-century American artists of Asian descent. Focuses on their critical engagement with notions of American modernism, and illuminates a transcultural positioning in modern American culture that predates our contemporary discourse on race and identity”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2016049439 | ISBN 9780271077734 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Japanese American art. | Art, Modern—20th century. | Modernism (Art)—United States. | Matsura, Frank, 1873–1913—Criticism and interpretation. | Ishigaki, Eitarō, 1893–1958— Criticism and interpretation. | Noda, Hideo, 1908– 1939—Criticism and interpretation. | Hayakawa, Miki, 1899–1953—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC N6538.J32 W36 2017 | DDC 709.04— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049439 Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in China Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Other American Moderns 1

1 2 3 4

Going “Native” in an American Borderland: Frank S. Matsura’s Photographic Miscegenation 9



By Proxy of His Black Heroes: Eitarō Ishigaki and the Battles for Equality 39



We Are Scottsboro Boys: Hideo Noda’s Visual Rhetoric of Transracial Solidarity 69



In Search of Miki: Hayakawa, a Californian Cosmopolitan 97 Epilogue: Concerning Exclusion 127

Notes 133 Bibliography 156 Index 169

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ILLUSTRATIONS 1

Frank Matsura, Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio, ca. 1912. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-01-99), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 8

2

Frank Matsura, Matsura and Norma Dillabough Studio Portraits, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-01-21), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 10

3

4

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Frank Matsura, Matsura in Clown Costumes, ca. 1908. Frank Matsura Photographs (3501-02), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 11 Frank Matsura, Matsura with Orril Gard and Mathilda Schaller at His Studio and Gallery During the Christmas Rush, 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-01-95), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 13

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Frank Matsura, Okanogan Scrapbook, ca. 1912. Frank Matsura Photographs (PC 35), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 17

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Frank Matsura, Landscape of an Okanogan Homestead, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-36-37), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 17

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Frank Matsura, Sunrise and Telephone Pole, ca. 1909. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-28-15), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 18

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Frank Matsura, Okanogan Fourth of July Parade, John C. Schaller’s Bakery Float, 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-01-19), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 19

9

Frank Matsura, Interior of Judge William Compton Brown’s Home, 1908. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-02-12), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 19

10 Frank Matsura, Twit-mich or “Big Jim,” Charley Leo, Suzanne Leo, and “Little Joe,”, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-14-16), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 21 11

Frank Matsura, Chiliwhist Jim, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-14-09), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 22

12 Lee Moorhouse, Nez Perce Chief Joseph Poses in Blanket Outdoors, 1901. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, NA605. 23 13 Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race— Navaho, ca. 1904. Originally published in The North American Indian, suppl. vol. 1, pl. 1. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.  23 14 Edward S. Curtis, Hamat’sa Emerging from the Woods—Koskimo, ca. 1914. Photographic print. Published in The North American Indian, vol. 10, 172. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 25

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15 Lee Moorhouse, Wo-ho-pum, Cayuse Indian Woman, in Costume, 1897/1920. Moorhouse (Major Lee) Photographs, PH036_4463, University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives. 26 16 Frank Matsura, Okanogan Baseball Team vs. Mission Team, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-12-41), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 27 17 Frank Matsura, Jessie Dillabough, Two Women, Matsura, and a Dog, Outdoors, ca. 1912. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-01-28), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 28

27 Eitarō Ishigaki, Self-Portrait, 1917. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 46 28 Eitarō Ishigaki, Town (Processional—1925), 1925. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 46 29 Eitarō Ishigaki, Head of a Woman, 1916. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan.  49 30 Bain News Service, Takeshi Kanno and Wife (Gertrude Farquharson Boyle Kanno), 1914. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., LC-B2- 316710.  50

19 Frank Matsura, Dollie Graves and Pearl Rasilbarth at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1911. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-16-109), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 30

31 Eitarō Ishigaki, Resistance, 1937. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 52

21 Frank Matsura, A Woman in Drag Sits on a Stoop and Smokes Cigar, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-04-34), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 32 22 Frank Matsura, Matsura, Cecil Jim, and Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-19-69), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 34 23 Frank Matsura, Matsura and Miss Cecil Chiliwhist, ca. 1910. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-01-05), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 35 24 Eitarō Ishigaki, The Bonus March, 1932. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 38

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26 Bonus Army shacks burning, Anacostia Flats, 1932. National Archives, College Park, Maryland, NA no. 531102. 43

18 Frank Matsura, Mathilda Schaller, Matsura, and Friends, ca. 1911. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-16-100), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries.  29

20 Frank Matsura, Two Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1912. Frank Matsura Photographs (35-15-48), Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), Washington State University Libraries. 30

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25 Eitarō Ishigaki, War Tractor, 1936. Ishigaki Memorial Museum, Taiji, Wayakama, Japan. 41

32 Eitarō Ishigaki, Boxing, 1925. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 53 33 Eitarō Ishigaki, Whipping (The Whip), 1925. The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan. Photo: The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. 54 34 Eitarō Ishigaki, Revolt on the Island of Cuba, 1933. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 55 35 Eitarō Ishigaki, Soldiers of People’s Front (The Zero Hour), ca. 1936–37. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 56 36 Louis Lozowick, Tanks #1 (The Tank) from New Masses, May 1929, 2. Louis Lozowick Estate, courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery. 58 37 Louis Lozowick, Lynching (Lynch Law), 1936. Louis Lozowick Estate, courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery. 59 38 William Gropper, Invading Grafters’ Paradise, from New Masses, February 1932, 15. Courtesy of William Gropper Estate. 62 39 Eitarō Ishigaki, Ku Klux Klan (South U.S.A.), 1936. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 63

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40 Eitarō Ishigaki, Harlem Courthouse mural study (1), ca. 1935–37. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 65

56 Hideo Noda, Entrance to Subway, 1934. Shiranuhi Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan. 94

41 Eitarō Ishigaki, Harlem Courthouse mural study (2), ca. 1935–37. The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 65

57 Hideo Noda, Inside of a Bus, 1937. Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan. 94

42 Unidentified photographer, Eitaro Ishigaki, ca. 1940. Federal Art Project, Photographic Division collection, ca. 1920–65, bulk 1935– 42. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 66

58 Hideo Noda, Shoeshine Man of New York, 1936. Mizoe Art Gallery, Fukuoka, Japan. 95

43 ACME News, Scottsboro Boys, 1931. 70 44 Prentiss Taylor, Scottsboro Limited, 1931. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 73 45 Jacob Burck, cover, New Masses, June 1931. 74 46 Hugo Gellert, Bourgeois Virtue in Scottsboro. From New Masses, June 1931, 7. Drawing. Hugo Gellert Estate, courtesy of Mary Ryan Gallery 74 47 Hideo Noda, Scottsboro Boys (Alabama), 1933. Mizoe Art Gallery, Fukuoka, Japan. 76 48 Hideo Noda, Girl in Car, 1932. Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan. 82 49 Hideo Noda, Two Children, 1934. Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan. Photo © Yokohama Museum of Art. 83 50 Hideo Noda, Portrait of Uchida, 1935. Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan. 84 51 Hideo Noda, School Life (Piedmont High School mural), 1937. Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan. 85 52 Hideo Noda, Woodstock Art Gallery, 1932. Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan. 87 53 Hideo Noda, On the Grass in Mill Valley, 1937. Mizoe Art Gallery, Fukuoka, Japan. 88 54 Hideo Noda, Winter in a City, 1937. Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan. 92 55 Hideo Noda, Street at the End of Year (The Hope of the Winter), 1934. Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan. 93

59 Miki Hayakawa, Portrait of a Negro, 1926. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Mrs. James D. Macneil (M.2004.27.2). Photo © 2016 Museum Associates / LACMA. 96 60 Miki Hayakawa, A Young Man, 1925. Reproduced in the catalogue of the FortyEighth San Francisco Art Association Exhibition. 99 61 Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Young Man Playing Ukulele), n.d. Collection Monterey Museum of Art. Gift of Mateo Lettunich, 2004.062. 102 62 Yun Gee, Artist Studio, 1926. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Honeyman Jr. and Mrs. James D. Macneil (M.2004.27.1). Photo © 2016 Museum Associates / LACMA. Courtesy of Estate of Yun Gee. 104 63 Otis Oldfield, Portrait of Yun Gee, 1926. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Dr. and Mrs. Christian Title and Carey Nachenberg (M.2004.242). Photo © 2016 Museum Associates/LACMA. © 2016 Estate of Otis Oldfield / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 105 64 Photo of Yun Gee, late 1920s. Courtesy of LiLan and Tina Keng Gallery, Taipei. 106 65 Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Seated Female Nude), 1928. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Bessie A. Hurt, 1986 (1986.103.1). Photo: Blair Clark. © Miki Hayakawa Estate.  111 66 Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Female Nude), 1927. Catalogue, California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, Season of 1927–28. Photo: Gabriel Moulin. Courtesy of San Francisco Art Institute Archives. 112 67 Miki Hayakawa, From My Window, 1935. Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra. 114

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68 Miki Hayakawa, One Afternoon, ca. 1940. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Preston McCrossen in memory of his wife, the artist, 1954 (520.23P). Photo: Blair Clark. © Miki Hayakawa Estate.  116 69 Miki Hayakawa, Portrait of a Young Man, ca. 1929. Collection of Amber and Richard Sakai. 118 70 Miki Hayakawa, Worker (Boy Sawing), ca. 1936. Collection of Amber and Richard Sakai. 119 71 Miki Hayakawa’s solo exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art, 1944. Courtesy of Astilli Art Services, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 121

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72 Miki Hayakawa, Cristo Rey Church, ca. 1944. Private collection. Courtesy of Coulter-Brooks Art and Antiques, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 123 73 William Ford, Miki, 1944. Courtesy of CoulterBrooks Art and Antiques and Astilli Art Services, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 124 74 Miki Hayakawa, William Ford, 1947. Courtesy of Astilli Art Services, Santa Fe, New Mexico. 125 75 Photo of Hideo Noda’s School Life (Piedmont High School mural) as restored and reassembled in the grand hall of the Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan.  130

Illustrations

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The realization of this book took a global village of selfless colleagues, family members, and complete strangers, who were generous with their time and steadfast in their support.

My first acknowledgment goes to the institutions that provided funding and

fellowships that made this international project possible: the Terra Foundation for American Art and its Senior Fellowship at Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Humanities Center at University of California, Merced, and its Individual Research Grants. Both offered me the funds to travel and conduct archival research in Japan and the United States, and the precious time to complete the manuscript. And my yearlong work in the American Art department of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2005 afforded me the opportunity to travel to Wakayama, Japan, to see Eitarō Ishigaki’s paintings, which, in retrospect, initiated this book project. For this I have Bruce Robertson to thank, whose sustained guidance, encouragement, and friendship in the past fifteen years have been invaluable.

I have had the good fortune of being the recipient of constructive insights from

many pioneering scholars in the field. Some have been unwavering champions of my scholarship, and I am truly grateful for their continuing confidence and support. Special acknowledgments must go to those who helped shape this book: Margo Machida, Ilene Susan Fort, Valerie J. Matsumoto, Erika Doss, Cécile Whiting, and, with a heavy heart, Karin Higa. Her seminal research and diverse projects reintroduced many forgotten Japanese American artists to a national and global audience, and many of us continue to benefit from her work. Karin’s passing in 2013 came as a surprise to me and many colleagues. But I treasure the memory of our one-on-one conversations since 2008: in the lobby of Hilton New York, surrounded by the usual College Art Association chaos; at Westwood’s Native Foods Café; and in that little café at 23rd and Lexington in New York, where she was in fact the first person to listen to my full articulation of a new project that is now this book. She is missed.

It is impossible to write a book that attempts to rediscover works by artists who

are largely absent from the received narratives of American art without locating and seeing the artwork. I thus must recognize the visionary collectors and gallerists whose passion and dedication helped preserve the legacies of the artists discussed in this

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book: Michael D. Brown, Richard and Amber Sakai, Sandra and Bram Dijkstra, Mary Ryan, Jan Brooks, David Astilli, Paula and Terry Trotter, Matt Kuhn, Thom Gianetto, and Steve Hauk in the United States, and Kazunobu Abe in Japan. I am most grateful for their generosity in sharing their collections and knowledge with me. Of course, my contact with and visit to these collections would not have been possible without those perennial professionals who coordinated our communications; Benjamin Morse (Sakai) and Tomoe Omura (Abe) deserve special thanks. Many museum curators and staff have also facilitated my access to museum collections in the past decade; their professionalism and patience—answering my seemingly never-ending questions and accommodating my (multiday) visits—are exemplary. My gratitude goes to Yasuhiko Okumura and Ichiro Okumura, Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama; Ryuta Hayashida, Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art; Yasuyo Urata, Uki City Shiranuhi Museum, Kumamoto; John Rexine, Monterey Museum of Art; Erica Prater, New Mexico Museum of Art; and Devi Noor, LACMA.

A recuperative project like this has to rely, in large measure, on archival materials

that may not have received much attention. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to a contingent of dedicated and knowledgeable librarians, archivists, registrars, and researchers who have taken the time to locate relevant documents or point me in the right direction in the past decade. They are, in a chronological order of our contact: Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick; Denice Sawatzky, UC Merced Kolligian Library; Emily Jones, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum; Jane Glover, De Young Museum; JoAnn Roe; Marilynn, and Georgene Fitzgerald, Okanogan County Historical Society; Mark O’English, Washington State University—Pullman; Barry Friedman; Robert Boyle; Jeff Gunderson, San Francisco Art Institute’s Anne Bremer Memorial Library; Tami J. Suzuki, San Francisco Public Library; Pauline Wolstencroft and Douglas Cordell, LACMA’s Balch Art Research Library; Nicolette Bromberg and Rebecca Baker, University of Washington Libraries; David Chambers; Marisa Bourgoin and Margaret Atkins, Archives of American Art; Rachel Greer, Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University; Inga Labeaune, Monterey Public Library; Michelle Gallagher Roberts and Rebecca Potance, New Mexico Museum of Art; Nancy BrownMartinez, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Sibel Melik, State Records Center and Archives, New Mexico; John Allison, Morgan County Archives, Alabama; Anne Schnoebelen, Treasure Island Museum Association; Christina Zeek, Carly Rustebakke, and Piper Wynn Severance, LACMA; Kristen Schmidt, University of Arizona Museum of Art; Julia Simic, University of Oregon Libraries; Gene-Manuel, Yun Gee and Li-Lan Archives; Hayato Sakurai, Taiji Historical Archives; and many others who assisted in handling paperwork for obtaining archival materials and images. I must also thank my one-time research assistants Katerina Tangco and Reem Yassine for digitizing images and locating texts, as well as the tireless staff at the School of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts at UC Merced who processed my endless travel and purchase requests, particularly Rebecca Dugger, Tracy England, Rhonda Pate, Janet Hansen, and Austyn Smith.

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Acknowledgments

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I am grateful to Eleanor H. Goodman, Executive Editor at Penn State University

Press, for believing in this book since the beginning, and for taking the time to guide me through this process with scrupulous professionalism. It has been a pleasure to work with the press’s competent editorial staff as well: Hannah Hebert, Jennifer Norton, Laura Reed-Morrisson, and John P. Morris. Acknowledgments must also go to the following colleagues and friends who have offered their invaluable time and advice toward this project along the way, ranging from reading proposals or partial drafts of my manuscript, editing and guiding journal articles, to providing opportunities for me to present my work in progress. They are Amelia Goerlitz, Joann Moser, Mary Savig, Christine Hennessey, and Elizabeth Broun, all at the Smithsonian Institution; Emily D. Shapiro and Marie Ladino, American Art; Anthony W. Lee and Sandra Matthews, Trans-Asian Photography Review; Sherri Tucker, Randal Maurice Jelks, and Ailecia, American Studies; the three journals’ anonymous reviewers; Greg Robinson; Tirza T. Latimer; Alexandra Chang; Joseph Jeon; Austen Barron Bailly; Kevin and Laurie Fellezs; Kathleen Hull; Alicia Volk; Martin Dang; Seth Bruder; and Lee Hao-Hsuan, for so generously helping out with translating essays and letters.

Finally, I could not have completed this book without the unconditional support

of my Taiwanese and American families—especially my mother, Lin-Dai Tsai, for shouldering translation duties—and, of course, Carey.

Acknowledgments

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Introduction The Other American Moderns

An Asian man wrapped in an Indian trade blanket stands next to a Native American woman, their facial expressions somber and their poses dignified. A muscular African American man towers over a crowd as he cradles a fallen comrade and stares down an approaching tank. A brooding black youth stands on the edge of a cityscape teeming with skeletal figures oblivious to his existence. A handsome African American man dressed in a suit and a bow tie sits for a portrait, while in a companion painting a woman artist stands in front of an easel finishing a canvas depicting what appears to be the same man.

Viewers may be surprised to learn that these images are works by American artists

of Asian descent who were active in the early twentieth-century United States. There seems little, in terms of subject matter or pictorial language, that associates these pictures with stereotypical notions of “Asian imagery,” such as landscape or nature paintings done with brush and ink. And the artists’ names are as unfamiliar as their oeuvres, even to those readers who are knowledgeable in modern American art history: Frank Sakae Matsura (松浦荣, 1873–1913), Eitarō Ishigaki (石垣荣太郎, 1893–1958), Hideo Benjamin Noda (野田英夫, 1908–1939), and Miki Hayakawa (ミキ早川, 1899– 1953). Yun Gee (朱沅芷, 1906–1963) has received more public exposure than the others in the group by way of exhibitions and auctions, but he is hardly a well-known name.1 A few pioneering publications have offered invaluable, albeit abbreviated, biographies of these “noncanonical” American modernists, including Artists in California, 1786–1940 (1986); Views from Asian California, 1920–1965 (1992); An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West (1998); and Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (2008), an expansive and groundbreaking publication that resulted from Stanford University’s comprehensive Asian American Art Project.2 These biographical sketches are useful for understanding the artists’ background and chronology in relation to when and where a piece of art might have been created. But questions concerning their pictorial strategies in relation to historical, ideological, and personal impetuses remain largely unexplored.

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What, for instance, compelled Matsura, the sole Japanese photographer in

Okanogan, Washington, to insert himself into portraits of Native Americans from 1907 to 1913? What did Ishigaki, a leftist painter in New York, wish to achieve through depicting a heroic African American demonstrator in the “Bonus Army” of 1932, when the press and even subsequent historical accounts tended to overlook black World War I veterans’ presence in the mass protest? How should we understand the pictorial choices that Noda made to give voice to the wrongfully accused “Scottsboro Boys” while engaging the artistic and sociopolitical discourses in the tumultuous thirties? And what moved Hayakawa, a highly accomplished woman artist who is virtually unknown today, to create intimate and carefully crafted portraits of a multicultural America in the so-called exclusion era (1882–1952), which was dominated by antiimmigration, anti-Japanese/Asian laws? To answer these questions, I began a decade of investigations that resulted in this collection of case studies focusing on the artists’ seminal and pivotal works: Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), The Bonus March (1932), Scottsboro Boys (1933), and Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926).

During my years of excavating understudied art collections and archival materials

in the United States and Japan, I have been repeatedly delighted to discover that these artists were in fact active and contributive members of many multiethnic communities on both American coasts in the pre–World War II era. For example, Matsura was the most beloved and prolific photographer in Okanogan and served as the go-to documentarian, photojournalist, and portraitist for local activities and residents of all backgrounds, Caucasian homesteaders and Native Americans alike. Ishigaki was one of the founding members of the John Reed Club (JRC) and the American Artists’ Congress, progressive artist collectives in New York in the 1930s that staged exhibitions and signed petitions to oppose fascism, censorship, and inequality on multiple fronts.3 Noda, fifteen years younger than Ishigaki and a fellow JRC member, was an assistant to Mexican muralist Diego Rivera on two major public projects, including the controversial Rockefeller mural in 1934, and was an award-winning participant in major exhibitions in the early 1930s, including those held by the Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Both Ishigaki and Noda were at one time students at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco, where Hayakawa was also trained. Hayakawa began showing her paintings alongside (now more well-known) Caucasian (male) artists in the San Francisco Bay Area as early as 1925, while she was still a student at CSFA, and more than held her own in numerous landmark exhibitions, such as the San Francisco Museum of [Modern] Art’s inaugural show in 1935 and the Golden Gate International Exposition’s displays of contemporary California art in 1939–40. These artists’ substantial volume of creative output, superb quality of pictures, and high levels of engagement with artistic, cultural, and sociopolitical discourses of their times make them as fascinating as many canonical artists.

Focused research and critical analyses devoted to these artists’ imagery are still

scant. Only a small group of scholars and researchers, whose names and work will recur throughout this book, have produced seminal literature on some of these artists. JoAnn Roe’s pioneering research on Matsura, for instance, introduced the photographer’s 2

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life and work to an international audience, as her Frank Matsura: Frontier Photographer (1981) was translated into Japanese.4 In addition to Andrew Hemingway’s brief discussions of Ishigaki and Noda in his Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement (2002), Tom Wolf’s essay “The Tip of the Iceberg: Early Asian-American Artists in New York” in Asian American Art (2008) offers another helpful survey of the artistic production of Ishigaki and Noda.5 The Other American Moderns is thus my contribution to expanding that limited body of scholarship and reintroducing into American art-historical discourse a group of artists whose visual production and personal histories give nuance to the existing narratives of American modernism.

The book is more than a rediscovery of “forgotten” minority artists in American

art, however.6 One of my aims is to explore and foreground diasporic artists’ critical engagement in confronting and reimagining “Americanness” and its inherent ideological complexities. I treat artwork as not just objects or responses to a particular historical event or moment, but artists’ dynamic means of participating in contemporary debates and interrogating notions of “Americanism” in terms of artistic alliances, race and class relations, socioeconomic strife, and American democratic ideals. James Clifford’s “discrepant cosmopolitanism,” which theorizes twentieth-century crosscultural transactions between people of different origins in diaspora, offers a useful conceptual framework for my analyses of minority immigrants’ visual production within the context of American modernism. As Clifford has elucidated, the term “cosmopolitanism” recognizes “worldly, productive sites of crossing; complex, unfinished paths between local and global attachments” in a modern era with increased migratory movements across national boundaries. And the word “discrepant” points to a more fluid and nuanced understanding of how a diasporic person positions herself/himself and her/his sense of belonging (“attachments”), as well as negotiates the power relations concerning national, cultural, and racioethnic affiliations. In other words, for a cosmopolitan there is no absolute “identity,” but one that shifts and reconfigures in response to the complex realities on the ground. Or, in some cases, an immigrant’s sense of self and belonging can remain rooted in her/his birth nation/culture regardless of the new environment and its assimilationist expectations of or limits on the diasporic subjects. The concept of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” enables us to perceive and value “different forms of encounter, negotiation, and multiple affiliation” that take place on an individual, as opposed to a nation-state, level. Diasporic people’s “resilient and inventive strategies for survival” allow them to “sustain and rearticulate a sense of who one is by appropriating, cutting, and mixing cultural forms.”7 I thus regard the visual production of the artists in this book as “discrepant cosmopolitan,” for they could be understood as productive and intercultural sites where Asian émigrés in modern America dealt with encounters of difference, relations of power, and formulations of their identities as they traversed national, racial, and ideological boundaries.

The “Other” in the book’s title is meant to be a multivalent and generative signi-

fier. It refers to the artists’ minority status in the context of American legal and racial demographic histories. The nation’s long record of promulgating exclusionary laws, such as the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted Asians’ immigration and Introduction

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naturalization eligibility, has been thoroughly studied, and immigration debates and policies continue to be a perennially relevant and galvanizing topic in the American political theater.8 As the artists in this book all depicted “people of color” in works created during the exclusion era, the “Other” in the title registers the shared but varied positions and perspectives from which the artists created their “imagery of the Other by the Other,” as I call it, that connects their works.

The word also points to the diasporic artists’ astute recognition of their own “other-

ness” in an exclusionist America where, as Asian immigrants, they faced an ambivalent reception. They were regarded as both alien (at times menacing) and desirable because of the perceived exoticism and aesthetic traditions that were supposedly embedded in their “Oriental” (to use the language of the time) backgrounds. This is the ambivalence of the émigré experience that both Clifford and cultural theorist Stuart Hall have thoroughly examined. Hall’s theorization of diasporic identities as those “which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference”—in other words, identity formation as a process of becoming, instead of an essence or being—informs my proposition to treat “Asian/Japanese American” as a positionality that is fluid and ambivalent, not fixed and axiomatic.9 My in-depth analyses of the artwork thus focus on foregrounding those processes of negotiation, made evident or implied in their pictorial strategies, through which the artists made sense of their perceived “otherness” within a predominantly Anglo-Saxon American milieu.

As art historian Janet Wolff has reminded us, conditions of diaspora, which include

displacement and marginalization, could be “quite strikingly productive” in generating “new perceptions of place” and facilitating “personal transformation, . . . discarding the lifelong habits and practices of a constraining social education and discovering new forms of self-expression.”10 Conditions of cosmopolitan modernism engendered an “impulse for stability and rootedness [that] issues from a sense of homelessness,” as art historian Angela Miller elucidates, “while the tolerance for ambiguity and multiple meanings was enabled by a feeling of being ‘at home in the world,’ an ability to occupy two positions at once.”11 Such conscious and evolving grappling, I posit, fueled the diasporic artists’ visual production in this book, as their varied and evolving pictorial strategies make evident. It enabled them to create works that simultaneously align them with and distinguish themselves from various groups formed around aesthetic, ethno-racial, or sociopolitical/class divisions. Intrinsic in their ongoing negotiation is not a “them vs. us” dichotomy with a rigidly demarcated boundary, though. Rather, one sees the artists’ efforts at forming alliances with various communities (not without underlying tensions or inherent power hierarchy) along porous artistic, cultural, and ideological lines. They served as agents of active contribution to, and criticism and redefinition of, what America, and being American, meant in specific historical moments in an exclusion era. In other words, my interest is in parsing the nuanced enunciations of these diasporic artists, particularly in visual terms, which recognize their “otherness,” relate to other Others, and, in turn, explicitly or indirectly foreground biased policies or perceptions that created the conditions for the diasporic subjects to stay “other.” Their visual production thus illuminates a form of cultural 4

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critique and trans-racioethnic positioning in early twentieth-century America that predates our contemporary discourse on race and identity.

By re-presenting the figurative work of diasporic minority artists created in the first

decades of the twentieth century, The Other American Moderns asks how we may complicate the received narratives of American modernism. The definition of “American modernism” I have in mind here is already a more inclusive one that, going beyond the Greenbergian valorization of abstraction (among other things), also encompasses figurative and realist works through which artists interrogate conditions of American modernity. In the words of historian Daniel Joseph Singal, modernism, “in its ideal form at least,” demands to “know ‘reality’ in all its depth and complexity, no matter how incomplete and paradoxical that knowledge might be, and no matter how painful.” It is a “Modernist world-view” that perceives the universe as unpredictable, “where nothing is ever stable,” and individuals must “repeatedly subject themselves—both directly, and vicariously through art—to the trials of experience” in order to acquire knowledge and understand moral values within changing historical circumstances.12 In this framework, I examine the diasporic artists’ work as their critical means of interrogating what living in America as a minority (in terms of race, but also gender) meant in the modern era. I argue that their figuration or figurative embodiment (representations of real-life figures) can be regarded as a modernist strategy in engaging cultural and ideological discourses of their times from the perspective of an Other—a cosmopolitan, a world citizen participating in the development of American modernism. As such, The Other American Moderns intervenes in the received American modern art history that has largely privileged Caucasian (male) and abstract artists through bringing into sharper relief these diasporic minority artists’ active contribution to an American culture that was indeed cosmopolitan and multicultural.

To be sure, the visual commentaries by the artists in this book are heterogeneous,

and their pictorial strategies vary greatly, ranging from realism to semiabstraction. I have chosen to present a collection of individual studies, highlighting such representational diversity of these artists’ work, as a way to resist the interventionist temptation to present an alternative “grand narrative/history” based solely on the artists’ race/ ethnicity. I begin and anchor each chapter with a close reading of one pivotal work in an artist’s oeuvre and expand the investigation to place the artwork within its cultural, sociopolitical, and ideological contexts. Offering delimited but comparative objectbased studies (intentionally incomplete “mininarratives”) enables me to analyze the artistic production of these marginalized artists without turning the chapters into full biographical accounts. While my approach is selective by design, I do incorporate some relevant information on the artists’ lives in order to highlight the intersection of personal and broader historical impetuses that might have informed their visual work. But my focus is on the imagery, on decoding the visual language and representational choices, and on offering interpretive possibilities—not definitive explanation, by any measure—that may engender future discourses and research.

The Other American Moderns begins with the photographic portraits by Matsura

produced in Okanogan, Washington, between 1907 and 1913. Matsura’s pictures are Introduction

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unusual not only because of his sitters’ divergent social and ethnic backgrounds, but also because he consistently inserted himself into studio portraits of Native American and Caucasian clients, wearing garments ranging from Euro-American suits to Indian trade blankets to clown costumes. I examine Matsura’s authorial masquerades as remarkable examples of how an immigrant creatively deployed photographic verisimilitude to navigate through a host country and its racial and sociopolitical landscape. Leading with a close but comparative reading of the photograph Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), I argue that Matsura’s seemingly innocuous (self-) portraits in fact served as productive and critical means for him to tackle broader issues, among them notions of belonging and community, paradigms of gender relations, and policies concerning the “Other,” such as Native Americans and aliens like him. Matsura’s photography offers a revealing picture of social, racial, and gender relations in a small northwestern town, and also historically grounds the scholarship on figurative and identity-conscious visual production in contemporary art.

The second and third chapters continue my investigation of pictorial figuration

as artists’ productive means of engaging in cultural and sociopolitical discourses. I focus on two topical paintings: Ishigaki’s The Bonus March (1932) and Noda’s Scottsboro Boys (1933). The former depicts a moment in World War I veterans’ famous march into Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1932, a time of severe economic difficulties, to demand that the government distribute the promised “bonus checks” to compensate for their wartime services. The latter refers to the sensational trials of nine African American teenagers wrongfully imprisoned, and even condemned to death, for allegedly assaulting two Caucasian women on a Southern Railroad freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1931. Neither artist offered his figurative painting, based on actual events, as “documentary” or objective reportage, however. Both artists used black protagonists to anchor their pictorial narratives, which not only call attention to the plight of African Americans but also tackle broader problems of socioeconomic inequality and injustice. I posit that both artists’ valorization of African American figures was informed by, and deeply connected to, their ideological alliance with the Left and recognition of their own perceived marginality. As such, through their black heroes, the artists in effect affirmed their solidarity with the disenfranchised minority and joined their progressive cohort in fighting for the democratic ideals of liberty and equal rights for all.

The fourth chapter begins with an examination of a pair of paintings produced

by two San Francisco–based artists in 1926: Miki Hayakawa’s Portrait of a Negro and Yun Gee’s Artist Studio, a semiabstract portrait of Hayakawa painting the same model. Hayakawa’s realistic figure showcases her artistic talent and academic training, while Gee’s use of broad brushstrokes of vibrant colors demonstrates his exploration of the dynamism of modernity that visual abstraction could convey. Along with a portrait of Gee by both artists’ teacher, Otis Oldfield (1890–1969), the trio of images illustrates the multicultural milieu that artists created in California in the early twentieth century. But, taking a step further, I consider the historic moment in which the portraits were produced: they were painted on the heels of the Immigration Act of 1924 (the 6

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Johnson-Reed Act), enacted to restrict immigration through a national origins quota that completely excluded Asians. The works point to the kind of intercultural negotiations and multiethnic alliances that local residents forged against an anti-immigration narrative—a debate that is still ongoing and relevant today.

This chapter is also a presentation of long-overdue biographical and object research

on Hayakawa. Since her death in 1953, she has received little focused scholarly or curatorial attention, in English or Japanese; she is the only artist in this book to suffer such neglect. Yet she was in fact one of the few diasporic Japanese artists, and certainly one of an even smaller group of woman artists, to have attained critical recognition, winning prizes and showing in major exhibitions between the 1920s and the 1940s. Known for her intricately constructed oil paintings, Hayakawa deployed figuration as productive means of forming her identity as a cosmopolitan artist who confidently traversed racially and culturally diverse collectives of artists and intellectuals both in California and New Mexico. Articulating complex visual rhetoric through manipulating and blending formal elements from divergent artistic traditions, Hayakawa created a great variety of imagery that speaks and contributes to the vibrant and heterogeneous modernism taking shape in pre–World War II California. Having rediscovered more than fifty paintings and drawings by or attributed to Hayakawa, I offer this chapter as the first scholarly attempt to “recover” and reconstruct her remarkable oeuvre and life story—a compelling version of those all-too-common narratives of how Pearl Harbor and the subsequent forced relocation uprooted and disrupted the promising artistic development of Americans and immigrants of Japanese descent.

The Other American Moderns is incomplete, I must acknowledge. These talented

artists and their fascinating oeuvres merit monographic treatment and catalogues raisonné in English. Its delimited scope, in part by design, makes this an open(-ended) rather than a “closed” book. For while I have I rediscovered images that had not been seen by the public for decades, and documents that had been buried in private archives, I know that much more is still out there. My intention is thus not to write definitive studies of any of these artists, but to generate interest, invite discussions, and potentially encourage or even catalyze future research projects that critically explore more fully the work and lives of these artists.

Introduction

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Going “Native” in an American Borderland Frank S. Matsura’s Photographic Miscegenation

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A seated woman and a standing man pose for a studio portrait (figure 1). Wearing a loose-fitting shirt and a patterned skirt, the woman raises her right hand, which holds an object that looks blurry because of its movement. Beneath the man’s closely combed hair is a solemn face, with deep horizontal lines across his forehead and skin sagging below his eyes. He wraps a large blanket around his body, a guarded gesture that contrasts with the woman’s frontal and open pose. There is an implied connection between the two, who share facial features that could be best described, without knowing their race or ethnicity, as “non-Caucasian.” Simultaneously, they engage the camera: her gaze appears direct and determined; his, weary and forlorn.

The given title, Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), compounds

a mystery associated with this photograph. It is attributed to Frank Sakae Matsura (1873–1913), which means the man in the picture is the photographer himself. But who is Matsura? What is his relationship to Timento, with whom he poses like a couple in a formal portrait? And what is the symbolism of Matsura, who has a Japanese name, wrapping himself in one of those trade blankets inspired by the designs of Native American textiles?1

Neither the portrait nor its photographer was familiar to the curatorial team to

which I belonged in 2005.2 It was thus surprising to discover that this image is only one of more than twenty-five hundred photographs attributed to Matsura, whose extensive oeuvre is divided between collections at the Okanogan County Historical Society and Washington State University–Pullman. According to the archives, Matsura’s prodigious output occurred between 1907 and his death, at age thirty-nine, in 1913.

As a chronicler and sought-after photographer in Okanogan, Matsura amassed

arguably the most comprehensive record of the region and its residents. But it is his portraiture that most fascinated me, for in addition to producing conventional studies, Matsura consistently pictured himself “play-acting” with his sitters. Particularly striking are the ones in which Matsura, a bachelor in his thirties, poses with his female models as if they are close friends, if not lovers, in stamp-sized photographs that

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1 Frank Matsura, Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio, ca. 1912.

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2  Frank Matsura, Matsura and Norma Dillabough Studio Portraits, ca. 1910.

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have been largely regarded as records of the horseplay among Matsura and company (figure 2). To me, Matsura’s photographic masquerade—wearing an array of garments, from animal coats, clown costumes, and European-style suits to Indian blankets— points to a sophisticated understanding of photography’s perceived verisimilitude (the appearance of being true or real) and performance (conscious acting for the camera and the imagined viewer) (figure 3). These are critical aspects that photographers have investigated since the medium’s invention in 1839. I have in mind, for example, the French photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson’s collaboration with the Countess de Castiglione between 1856 and 1895, which resulted in more than four hundred portraits of the countess presenting herself in a myriad of styles and settings.3 Matsura’s “authorial participation” (inserting himself into the imagery) also reminds me of some late-twentiethcentury photographers’ work, in which the artists deploy “visual embodiment”—incorporating their own bodies in their picture making—as a strategy to offer photographic interrogations of issues ranging from geopolitics and the effects of commercial imperialism to visual “passings” that disturb and call into question national, racial, and cultural stereotypes. Tseng Kwong Chi (Hong Kong, 1950–1990) and Nikki S. Lee (South Korea, b. 1970), to mention only two, come to mind.4

Matsura’s studio (self-)portraits, such as

Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio, could be regarded as remarkable precedents of the post–World War II imagery of physical, geographical, and cultural traversals. This enables me to reframe Matsura’s repertoire, which has been presented in the existing, albeit scant, literature as the work of a prolific documentarian.5 Glen Mimura’s 2010 essay offers the most recent and welcome critical reading of Matsura’s documentation of the Okanogan region. His analysis shows that

3 Frank Matsura, Matsura in Clown Costumes, ca. 1908.

Matsura’s work gives us a more nuanced picture than that of other (white) frontier photographers, which perpetuated a national narrative of a “dying West” and “vanishing Indians.”6 Focusing on Matsura’s portraiture, I consider his pictorial constructs as a kind of self-conscious photographic investigation of conditions of diaspora, but without the ironic and even confrontational visual rhetoric that the post–World War II artists have presented in their imagery of dislocation, anxieties, and ambiguities. Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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Collectively, Matsura’s portraiture presents a picture of nuanced relationships among the residents of an American “borderland,” a town where everyone was a transplant either by choice, as in homesteaders’ pursuit of economic opportunity, or due to political and legislative pressure, as in Native Americans’ forced relocation into reservations. (I use both “borderland” and “frontier” here, with a preference for the former, as it points to the implied tension in the contacts between peoples/cultures/economicpolitical interests without mythologizing or leaving unquestioned an expansionist impulse embedded in the term “frontier.”) Photography offered Matsura a dynamic tool to engage with the people in a host country that he chose to call home.

This is not to say that Matsura’s work was uncritical, however, as my analysis

of the Matsura-Timento portrait will show. Through incorporating his own body, Matsura’s portraiture presents a revealing and unconventional picture of social, racial, and gender crossings in an American borderland town. Read against the backdrop of assimilationist policies that aimed at achieving an institutionalized erasure of difference vis-à-vis Native Americans, Matsura’s pictures of “playing spouse” with both Indian and Caucasian women—“photographic miscegenation,” as I call it—can be understood as his productive means of interrogating sociopolitical issues that had immediate and personal relevance for him and his cohort. A Mysterious Alien A biographical sketch will help to establish Matsura’s background and his milieu in Okanogan.7 It should be noted, however, that what people in town knew about Matsura’s life in Japan came from his own, selective accounts. It appears that Matsura was aware of the fluidity of one’s identity and engaged in a kind of re-presentation of who he was. For example, JoAnn Roe reported that Matsura arrived in Okanogan a cultured and educated man who could speak English with “scarcely an accent.” Yet when strangers came to town and addressed him in pidgin English, he would play along and respond with “an outrageous flood of broken English,” which was apparently a put-on, if the stranger stayed long enough to discover.8

In any case, Matsura’s version of the story was that he sailed to the United States

in 1901, disembarking in Alaska and traveling on to Seattle, where he found jobs paying meager wages. In 1903, he answered an ad for a handyman at the Elliot Hotel in Conconully, the Okanogan County seat at the time, and became a beloved employee, described as hardworking and pleasant. According to Roe’s research, Matsura took pictures when he was off duty and made prints in the hotel’s laundry-room sinks. He also began receiving commissions to photograph economic development around the county. As early as 1904, Matsura’s name appeared in the local newspaper, the Okanogan Record, often accompanied by praise. “We have on our desk a panoramic view of Conconully, the compliments of Mr. Frank Matsuura, which is a very credible piece of work,” an Okanogan Record article proclaimed, adding that “Frank is one of the most successful amateur photographers in this section.”9 Around 1905, a year or so after his photography began to attract attention in local newspapers, Matsura 12

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4 Frank Matsura, Matsura with Orril Gard and Mathilda Schaller at His Studio and Gallery During the Christmas Rush, 1910.

altered the spelling of his name in newspaper advertisements of his business, from the original “Matsuura” to “Matsura.”10 Matsura’s decision to remove a “u,” while minor, indicates his astute understanding of an immigrant’s (freedom of) self-representation and, from an entrepreneurial perspective, the importance of name or “branding,” to use our contemporary marketing parlance.11

With demand rising for his photographic services, Matsura established a studio

in Okanogan in 1908. His business flourished, thanks to his entrepreneurial savvy. He advertised in the local newspaper, for instance, that a portrait was the perfect Christmas gift for friends and family (figure 4). His popularity is apparent from the attention he received when in 1906, thanks to the generosity of a Japanese relative, he purchased a camera that cost three hundred and fifteen dollars. The Okanogan Record commemorated the occasion: “It is an instrument of which anyone might feel proud. Now we may look for even better views than ever of our beautiful surrounding scenery.”12 This pronouncement attests to Matsura’s status in the community, but it also provides a clue to how his background distinguished him from the working-class residents of Okanogan. For a Japanese immigrant to receive that amount of money (equivalent to more than seven thousand dollars today) implies that Matsura’s family had considerable financial means, an indication of his upbringing in a certain social class.

Another clue to Matsura’s background was his possession of a sword that he used

while performing ceremonial dances.13 The sword was traditionally associated with warriors, or samurai, who constituted an exclusive class in Japan that maintained political dominance from the late twelfth to the mid-nineteenth century. The samurai class weakened and was eventually dismantled in the Meiji era (1868–1912), during Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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which measures were taken to modernize Japanese society. In addition to the establishment of a conscripted army, which in turn diminished the samurai class’s power, the display or wearing of the samurai sword in public was also outlawed. The sword was clearly important to Matsura—a link to his family and their past, perhaps—given that he traveled with it across the Pacific Ocean and into a new life. The sword’s historical specificity and cultural symbolism might not have been accessible to the Okanoganians at the time, however.14

What the local residents also did not know was that Matsura, in addition to

coming from a prominent familial line, had experienced tragedies at a young age. Tatsuo Kurihara, a Japanese photographer and devoted biographer, uncovered that Matsura came from the Matsura clan, who ruled the Hirado Domain in the modern-day Nagasaki Prefecture. One of the hereditary clan leaders, Shigenobu Matsura (松浦鎮信), was a warlord who fought on the side of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀

吉)—the legendary general and politician who unified sixteenth-century Japan and restricted the right to bear arms to the samurai class—to conquer Kyūshū, one of Japan’s southernmost islands, in 1587. By the time Sakae (Frank) was born, the eldest son of Yasushi Matsura (松浦安), in 1873, his family had become part of the Shizoku, the “warrior-families” class that was created to absorb the samurai warriors under the Meiji Restoration as a way to weaken their political influence. Young Sakae lost both parents to illness before he turned nine, and his grandmother, who was his and his sisters’ guardian, died when he was twelve. In 1886, he was sent to live with his uncle Masashi Okami (岡見正), his father’s younger brother, who married into the Okami family and took their last name.15

As Matsura’s “adopted” father, Okami played an instrumental role in providing

young Sakae with the kind of upbringing that would inform his photographic work in Okanogan. Okami was a teacher, a learned man who dabbled in a variety of subjects, among them Sinology, calligraphy, ink painting, sculpture, singing, gymnastics, and English.16 After earning his teaching credentials and certificate, Okami became a lecturer and eventually the principal of the Shōei elementary school (1886–1907), where a twenty-year-old Matsura taught at the Sunday school and assisted in administrative work from 1893 to 1896. Okami also taught at the Shōei girls’ junior and senior high school and other schools for several years. He became a Christian in 1878 and served as an elder at Daimachi Church in Tokyo, where Matsura was baptized in 1888 by a pastor named Kumaji Kimura (木村熊二). Kimura, who traveled to the United States in 1870, studied in a seminary, and was ordained by the classis of New Brunswick of the Reformed Church in 1882, was more than Matsura’s pastor.17 He was a student of Renjō Shimooka (下岡蓮杖), one of the pioneers of photography in Japan in the nineteenth century. Kurihara suggests that it was from Kimura that a young and curious Matsura learned English and acquired sufficient technical proficiency to be able to start his photography business in Okanogan.18

Most of this background information was withheld from his friends in America,

however. He did serve as a Japanese representative of sorts and talked about Japan to the locals, who appeared, judging by the frequent reports in the Okanogan Record, 14

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to show great interest in the Japanese Empire’s militaristic ambitions, as seen in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).19 Japan’s imperial tentacles reached Okanogan and Matsura in early 1905, in the form of an enlistment that asked Matsura to fulfill his duty as a male adult citizen of Japan. Matsura reappeared in town in less than a month, however, having literally missed the boat on which he was supposed to leave for the warfront.20 Whether or not he intentionally deserted could not be verified, but, having left his native land and old life behind, Matsura seemed content to stay in his adopted home in Okanogan and cast himself as both a worker and a photographer of the people in his new life. “Frank’s home is in Tokyo, but he says that he likes living under the stars and stripes pretty well,” an Okanogan Record article proclaimed.21

And indeed, Matsura’s success in integrating himself into the community is evi-

dent in the response to his sudden death, from hemoptysis, on June 16, 1913. His last moments were recounted in newspapers in a dramatic fashion: “Joe Leader, town marshal at Okanogan, thought he had discovered a burglar in Mr. Neuman’s store, and while he had the place guarded asked Matsura to notify the proprietor. Matsura did not run, according to those who saw him on the way, but he was of an excitable disposition and probably took the matter too seriously. He fell over on Mr. Muldrow’s porch with the remark, “Oh, I am dying.”22 An Okanogan Independent story, entitled “Frank S. Matsura Called by Death,” also reported that “Frank’s death was dramatic in the extreme,” but that his friends had known for some time that Matsura’s health had been deteriorating. The article concluded by giving him unreserved praise: “[Matsura] held the highest esteem of all who knew him. He was one of the most popular men in Okanogan,” and “although an unpretentious, unassuming, modest little Jap, Frank’s place in Okanogan city will never be filled.”23 In the language of the time, “little Jap” may simply have signaled Matsura’s small stature and his foreignness, though it still carried a hint of prejudice, for the proper “Japanese” could have been used in print. It is notable, however, that an immigrant’s presence and influence on his host community was so thoroughly recognized.

Matsura’s funeral was one of the major events in Okanogan during the summer

of 1913. The Okanogan Independent reported that more than three hundred mourners packed Okanogan’s auditorium, the largest hall in town, for his public memorial. In the eulogy, which was transcribed at length in the newspaper, the Reverend Fred J. Hart cited Genesis 50:26 and drew parallels between Matsura’s residency in Okanogan and Joseph’s exile in Egypt, where he embraced people, language, and customs alien to him. Just as Joseph “became one of the truest and most useful of Egyptian citizens and patriots,” he said, Matsura was perceived to be an “excellent citizen” and one of the most “useful men in our community.” Usefulness, as the reverend emphasized, was the highest praise anyone could give to someone like Matsura, who always “assisted in civic enterprises,” including cleaning parks and repairing roads. And no one else had done as much as Matsura, the reverend added, to “advertise Okanogan and vicinity,” referring to his photography. “Frank was a friend to everyone in Okanogan. Not a man or woman in town but mourns his loss. . . . Life in our town was brighter and better for his presence.”24 Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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The effusive tribute in the Okanogan Independent, timed to appear on Independence

Day, five days after the funeral took place, could be regarded as a tacit commentary on both Matsura’s full integration and the exclusionary immigration policies that prevented this “useful” member from obtaining a recognized status. The reverend’s repeated use of the word “citizen” to describe Matsura, for example, served as an implicit intervention to affirm Matsura’s standing in the community, for it was reported that Matsura lamented that “the laws of the United States would not let him become a citizen. He liked America and it is doubtful he had an enemy in the country.”25 Whether or not the statement was entirely the work of a sympathetic newspaper writer is unclear. It nevertheless represented the community’s sentiment toward the loss of an immigrant whom the townspeople had embraced, the writer put it, as one of “their own.” Portraits of a Diasporic Community The phrase “their own” requires qualification. As mentioned, Okanogan consisted of demographically diverse people who moved to the area for a variety of reasons. The 1910 census counted more than 12,500 people living in the 5,211-square-mile county, a region with enough economic activities to be recognized and established by the state legislature as Okanogan County in 1888. The residents were predominantly white homesteaders, but there were also several groups of Native Americans, such as Okanogan, Colville, San Poil, Moses, and Methow. Formerly the indigenous peoples had lived in the broader Okanogan region and maintained a seminomadic life, but policies put forth by President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, such as the so-called Peace Policy, ended up confining them to limited areas, such as the Colville Reservation, which occupied the southeastern portion of Okanogan County.26

As the historian Murray Morgan points out, by the time Matsura arrived in the

Okanogan Valley in 1903, there were “cows and cowboys, kids and one-room schools, steamboats round the bend, railroads in the offing, and telephone lines looping across the brown hills.”27 There were also “three main street saloons, two hotels with dining rooms (the Central and the Riverside), and several restaurants.”28 These became the subjects of Matsura’s pictures. Being the photographer in town, Matsura, with his camera, went everywhere to capture all aspects of the region’s development, such as the Okanogan Irrigation Project of the United States Reclamation Service, which created the Conconully Dam to supply water to ten thousand acres of farmland; the steel drawbridges in Okanogan and Omak, which made transportation more expedient for the residents; and the extension of the track of the Great Northern Railroad into the Okanogan Valley, which more conveniently brought goods and people from other areas, to cite only three examples.29 He traveled with surveyors and paid special attention to workers and Indian communities. He also acted as a photojournalist, reporting on problems, such as the collapse of a link of Omak’s drawbridge, as well as landmark events, including the arrival of the first passenger car of the Great Northern Railroad and the Centennial Flag Raising at Fort Okanogan in 1911.30 16

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For the most part, Matsura’s pictures of the

region can be regarded as “documentary,” insofar as he approached and framed many of his photographic subjects in an arguably straightforward manner. He deployed no dramatic angles or compositions to show buildings, construction sites, homesteads, or Indian reservations (figure 5). And his camera appeared to be always placed at a distance, adding to the observational or “objective” nature of his imagery. One could argue that the documentary value of Matsura’s photographs resides in his letting his camera be an eyewitness to a variety of life events as they took place and not manipulating the photographic processes, beyond the basic printing methods.

This is not to say, however, that Matsura was

unaware of photography’s ability to create aesthetic representations of the region that would appeal to his viewers, who, in turn, would purchase the photographs that he turned into postcards for sale in his shop. For instance, a 1910 photograph of an Okanogan homestead perched on top of a hill points to Matsura’s sense of design based on his knowledge of artistic conventions (figure 6). The composition has clear divisions, with the sky in the background taking up onethird of the image. The lines of trees start in the lower-right corner in the foreground and guide the viewer’s eye diagonally up the hills. And there is an interplay of texture and tone between the sky and the sparsely forested land. With the little white house at the center of the composition, the photograph indicates Matsura’s consciousness of representing a romantic vision that conveys the beauty of nature, the opportunity and possibilities that the wide-open space could offer, and the infinitesimal existence of a frontier explorer. It could also be regarded as Matsura’s nod to European/American picturesque landscape traditions that established pictorial

5 Frank Matsura, Okanogan Scrapbook, ca. 1912. 6 Frank Matsura, Landscape of an Okanogan Homestead, ca. 1910.

schemes for artists to follow in creating their paintings.

Another photograph, Sunrise and Telephone Pole (ca. 1909), is even more indicative

of Matsura’s awareness of photography’s artistic potential, beyond his documentarian practice of recording the happenings in town (figure 7). Here the composition appears calculated: the barely visible ridge is a dark sliver that cuts across the bottom of the picture, with a telephone pole rising on the far right edge and towering over the mountain range. The rest of the picture is left open to showcase the rolling clouds and brilliant rays of light that radiate from the rising sun toward an expansive sky. Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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7 Frank Matsura, Sunrise and Telephone Pole, ca. 1909.

Pictured in the shape of a cross, the telephone pole imbues the scene with a sense of religious reverence, as if it stood as witness to the magnificence of nature created by God. The divine reference is unlikely to be accidental, considering Matsura’s religious background as a Christian since the age of sixteen. But the choice to push the hilltops and pole close to the picture plane and almost out of the frame also recalls similar pictorial devices that Edo period Japanese artists deployed in their famed woodblock prints—for instance, the work of Katsushika Hokusai, best known for The Great Wave at Kanagawa (ca. 1831–33), comes to mind. Of course, one could also link the composition to the visual characteristics of Japonisme, a nineteenth-century French term that refers to the influence of Japanese aesthetics on European and American artists. Works by artists such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American), Vincent van Gogh (Dutch), and Gustav Klimt (Austrian), to name only a few, show the artists’ fascination with the off-center compositions and chromatic arrangements in Japanese ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) prints. The visual affinities in Matsura’s photography with Japanese and Euramerican pictorial arts, albeit indirect, suggest his sophisticated and worldly knowledge of artistic traditions.

But the genre in which Matsura invested most of his creative energy, in my view,

was portraiture. Prominent in his oeuvre, Matsura’s pictures of people, taken in and out of his studio, constituted his source of income. People flocked to Matsura’s studio for formal portraits, judging by the hundreds of photographs produced between 1908 and 1913 (figure 8). Parents brought their children, men and women posed with 18

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their lovers or friends, and sports teams and professional organizations sat for group pictures.31 Matsura was also invited to capture on film local residents proudly displaying their homes to the imagined viewer for posterity. In an interior view of Judge William Compton Brown’s home, for example, one gets a glimpse of the domestic life of an important local figure (figure 9). Shown with his mother, Mrs. C. A. Brown, Judge Brown engages the camera (Matsura) as he cradles the head of his dog, Mickey. Incidentally, Brown, who was a judge of the Superior Court of Okanogan County and one of Matsura’s closest friends (“he was one of the best friends I ever had in all my life,” Brown said of Matsura), acted as custodian of Matsura’s photographs and personal effects after the photographer’s death in 1913.32 More than being means of earning a living, Matsura’s portraits would become revealing representations that enable us, more than a century later, to see the faces of settlers and migrant workers of various ethnic backgrounds, those who are often rendered anonymous in the broader historical narratives.

The large number of clients who used

Matsura’s photographic service illustrates a sustained fascination with photography since its invention in 1839. Some seventy years later, in a small town in Washington, people gladly took advantage of the improved technology, such as shorter exposure times and greater film sensitivity, and had their likenesses captured for posterity. As the late scholar and photographer Allan Sekula has elucidated, the photographic portrait “extends, accelerates, popularizes, and degrades” the traditional function that painted portraiture since the seventeenth century had assumed: the “ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self.”33 Because painted portraiture was prohibitively expensive for the working class, it was the wealthy who could

8 Frank Matsura, Okanogan Fourth of July Parade, John C. Schaller’s Bakery Float, 1910. 9 Frank Matsura, Interior of Judge William Compton Brown’s Home, 1908.

afford to hire painters to create ceremonial or “honorific” (Sekula’s term) imagery of themselves for both private and public consumption. Photography diminished and removed painted portraiture’s exclusivity because the proliferation of image-making tools helped create a more level playing field, at least as far as the accessibility to portraiture is concerned.

Sekula also points out, though, that photography is always “paradoxical” as a

“system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively,” a “double operation” that is most apparent in photographic portraiture. As machineproduced imagery, photographs were believed to be “true” and “objective,” although Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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these notions were challenged by its practitioners as early as the time of the medium’s inception. For example, the French photographer Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) created his (in)famous Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man in 1840, after Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) in France and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) in England reportedly preempted Bayard in announcing their respective inventions of photography, in 1939. Bayard, obviously, did not actually commit suicide by drowning. The picture, which could be taken by an unknowing viewer as an eyewitness record, was used by Bayard as an indirect but critical comment on how he was unfairly treated in France.34 Bolstered by the belief in its supposed verisimilitude, photography not only served the commemorative (“honorific”) function for the bourgeois, but also served as the preferred instrument for biological, medical, ethnographic, and other studies and documentation. Implicit in such ostensibly “objective” photography was an impulse to make visible the difference (physical, cultural, spiritual, and so on) between European imperialists (early adopters of state-sponsored photographic surveys of colonies, for example) and everyone who did not look or act like them, or the Other. Photography’s role, in this context, was to “define both the generalized look—the typology—and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology,” as Sekula writes.35

In other words, photography contributed to establishing paradigms in which

pictures were used to show, substantiate, and support judgment of normality (mainstream) or abnormality (deviation) in terms of physiognomy, behavior, and various social and cultural customs and practices. Photographs of criminals, patients with physical or mental diseases, dissenters and rebels (within and outside of colonial powers), and foreigners and immigrants offered visual contrasts to the bourgeois order that those in power worked to uphold. “Every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police,” Sekula reminds us, and the photographic portrait has always been a “socially ameliorative as well as socially repressive instrument.”36

Considering Matsura’s portraits in this framework gives us a more nuanced read-

ing of his portraiture beyond treating the pictures as mechanical reproductions by a documentarian or commercial photographer. The “double operation” of portraiture is further complicated in Matsura’s case because of his dual role as the maker and the subject. Understanding photographic portraiture’s paradoxical nature enables us to consider Matsura’s photography as a critical means through which differences were negotiated and broader issues investigated, among them notions of belonging and community, paradigms of gender relations, and policies concerning “the Other,” such as Native Americans and aliens like him. Picturing Real Native Americans Matsura was trusted in the Indian communities. They let him photograph them on the reservations and also traveled to his studio to commission formal portraits. For both types of pictures, they dressed to the nines to ensure that they were represented in the best light. For instance, in an outdoor group portrait, Twit-mich or “Big Jim,” 20

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10 Frank Matsura, Twit-mich or “Big Jim,” Charley Leo, Suzanne Leo, and “Little Joe,” ca. 1910.

Charley Leo, Suzanne Leo, and “Little Joe” from 1910, five Native Americans stand in front of a cabin and wear ornately accessorized outfits that identify their various occupations (figure 10). While the lineup looks contrived, it is clear that they were fully aware of the importance of presenting themselves in the best state possible for the camera and the imagined viewer and, in turn, for posterity. Another picture, entitled Washington Kloochman (1910), shows a woman (kloochman in the Chinook language means “woman”) sitting on a fur chair in a polka-dot dress and a large shawl over her shoulders. She not only wears white shells as earrings, but also proudly displays a beaded bag on her lap, her hands framing it to highlight its importance as her possession.37 One of Matsura’s most elaborately dressed and frequently photographed sitters was Chiliwhist Jim (figure 11). According to Washington State University’s archival description, Jim (La-ka-kin), a Methow Indian from Malott (nine miles to the southwest of the city of Okanogan), was a medicine man and prosperous rancher. In the 1910 portrait, all his identifiers are on display: feathers, concentric necklaces, embroidered vest and pants, beaded moccasins. Holding an upright pose, Jim looks proud and statuesque, and is framed by the aura in the backdrop, which simultaneously foregrounds his face and imbues him with a sense of dignity. Jim’s pose is reminiscent of a 1901 portrait of the legendary Chief Joseph of the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce), taken by another photographer with an extensive Native American portfolio, Major Lee Moorhouse (1850–1926) (figure 12).38 But compared to Moorhouse’s imposing, fullbody shot of Chief Joseph, Matsura’s portrait is more intimate, an impression created by the closeness of the camera to his sitter and the position of the lens, set at about the same height as the seated Jim. Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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In his essay “A Dying West?” Glen Mimura proposes

that Matsura’s pictures of local Native peoples offer far more complex depictions of “a frontier society in transition” than the “uniform pronouncement on the ‘death’ of the frontier and its Native peoples” exemplified by the photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis’s project (and I would include Moorhouse’s), which perpetuated the myth of Native Americans’ “irreversible process of cultural and biological extinction.”39 The project to which Mimura refers is The North American Indian (1907–1930) by Curtis (1868–1952), a twenty-volume publication that contains pictures of Native Americans from more than eighty tribes. With the sponsorship of John Pierpont “J.  P.” Morgan (1837–1913) and the endorsement of President Theodore Roosevelt, Curtis took more than forty thousand photographs in twenty-three years. Serving also as an ethnologist, Curtis recorded and documented Native languages, music and songs, customs, traditions, and biographies. His main objective for this herculean project was clearly outlined in his description that accompanied the large plate entitled The Vanishing Race—Navaho (figure 13) in the first volume of The North American Indian: “The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, the author 11 Frank Matsura, Chiliwhist Jim, ca. 1910.

has chosen it as the first of the series.”40 Indeed, this much-reproduced image aptly illustrates Curtis’s pictorial approach and the “vanishing race” subtext of his American Indian project. The anonymous figures are riding horses on a dimly lit path toward a horizon where ominous gloom awaits. Undulating lines render the picture lyrical and dreamlike. Such pictorial characteristics suggest Curtis’s awareness of and perhaps nod to the aesthetics of pictorialism, which highlight photography’s artistic or “painterly” qualities, as seen in the work of photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in New York and the Seattle Camera Club in Washington.41 However, unlike the pictorialists’ general emphasis on the form (often bordering on abstraction) over the subject matter of a picture, Curtis’s heavy-handed and sentimental rendition of “doomed” Native Americans, reinforced by the soft focus and saturated brown ink used in photogravure printing, is a skillfully crafted epitome of melancholy.42 It is also an image that drives home the view shared by many of his contemporaries that he and his camera were the last witness to the extinction of American Indians.

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12 Lee Moorhouse, Nez Perce Chief Joseph Poses in Blanket Outdoors, 1901. 13 Edward S. Curtis, The Vanishing Race—Navaho, ca. 1904. Platinum print, sepia toned, 6.25 × 8 in.

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Mimura proposes that for Curtis, “the photograph was a window looking onto

an extinct, or quickly dying, world,” and his The North American Indian series was very much a major contributor to the “melancholic vision of a mythic American West.” An image like The Vanishing Race—Navaho reveals Curtis’s photographic project to be a romanticized and ultimately tragic story of American Indians, despite his ostensibly preservationist (if only in visual and textual terms) efforts. Matsura’s work, on the other hand, “implies no such epistemological conceit: the photographer and his subjects evidently share the same world; walk the same streets, fields, and riverbanks; live in the same historical time.”43 In other words, Matsura’s photography presents to the viewer, then and now, varied aspects of the real and living Native peoples in Okanogan. Collectively, these pictures demonstrate their “extraordinary versatility in adapting to the new, difficult historical circumstances,” as they are shown to have lived and even thrived in a “respectful if uneven, ambivalent coexistence.”44 As the Native American writer and curator Rayna Green also points out, “What [Matsura] shows of Indians . . . what he shows of this frontier world, is not deviance and heartbreak and isolation. . . . His images of Indian ranchers and cowboys alone give us a better sense of what and who Indians were during those awful years after reservationization.”45

Mimura further argues that Matsura’s approach was informed by his identification

with Native peoples, for he was “keenly aware, and time and again made aware, of his peculiar, contradictory status as local and outsider: an outsider who, however beloved, could not become local in quite the same way as white settlers due to his racialization.”46 As a Japanese alien, Matsura did not seem interested in perpetuating the mythologized vision of the frontier as either a “one-way street of Manifest Destiny” or “the unilateral proving ground of white American manhood.”47 Instead, he presented a “multivalent space constituted by the uneven, overlapping histories of indigenous adaptation and white settlement.” Matsura’s camera “vibrantly documented an alternative vision of this corner of the American West that continues to unsettle the national imaginary.”48 A Photographic Borderland What, then, was Matsura’s alternative narrative? Other than going against the prevalent “vanishing race” plot, how was Matsura’s “American story” told in visual terms? I suggest that Matsura’s ambivalent (local/outsider) position, as Mimura rightly characterizes it, enabled the photographer to experience and represent an American borderland from a perspective different from that of other photographers. This difference is evident in his portraits, which make room for nonnormative expressions and behaviors to be performed for the camera. Within the safe confines of his studio, Matsura and his sitters collaborated on using photography to articulate their friendships in visual terms, generate shared diasporic experiences, and develop a sense of place (home), all the while allowing differences to manifest and coexist.

One crucial difference in Matsura’s strategy of portraying Native American is that

he seemed to foreground the agency of his models. He achieved this by grounding his work in a give-and-take collaboration: more than being passive clients instructed 24

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to pose, his sitters appear to have been invited to participate in Matsura’s picture making. We do not see portrayals of Native Americans in a highly dramatic or stylized fashion, such as Curtis’s seemingly “possessed” Hamat’sa shaman (figure 14) and Moorhouse’s image of a barebreasted Indian woman, which emulates European paintings of female nudes.49 Both photographers also created romantic depictions of near-nude Indian men posing, in a rather melancholic manner, amidst an expansive landscape that emphasizes the lone, infinitesimal, and fading existence of the “noble savage” (whose supposed savagery is illustrated by the unnecessary nakedness)—two prime examples are Moorhouse’s Tumwater Falls on the Columbia River (1901) and Curtis’s On The Shores of Clear Lake (1924).50 These serve as visual types that perpetuate the pictorial depictions of Native Americans’ different or “exotic” customs as perceived by mainstream viewers. The “authenticity” of both Curtis’s and Moorhouse’s imagery has been called into question by numerous scholars on the grounds that the photographers routinely staged or manipulated their imagery to serve their agendas. For example, it was reported that the photographers would supply costumes and props to their Native models to replace their contemporary clothing or accessories—signifiers of modernity or economic development and adaptability—which might contradict the appearance or sentiment of a remote (different) culture belonging to a bygone era that the photographers tried to achieve in their imagery. There were also instances in which the photographs were retouched to remove existing elements to make the scenes more “authentic” (read, undeveloped or unmodernized) for mainstream consumers.

To be sure, while the photographers may have directed the models to put on cer-

tain appearances for their pictures, neither Curtis nor Moorhouse was known to have

14 Edward S. Curtis, Hamat’sa Emerging from the Woods—Koskimo, ca. 1914. Photographic print.

compelled Native peoples to cooperate by using force. Scholars have shown that in many cases these indigenous models “may have had both their own reasons for participating and the means and motivation to directly influence the nature of the resulting pictures.”51 In other words, the models had the choice to decide whether or not they wanted to pose for the picture—a choice likely motivated by both their fascination with modern photographic technology and a desire to have their likenesses recorded for posterity. But the Native models, by and large, did not have much (if any) influence on the photographers’ final selections of imagery for publication, nor were they known to have been involved in the sale of their portraits, such as those in Moorhouse’s popular Souvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs, which went through two editions.52 In Moorhouse’s pictorial representation, his Native models (while having their names recorded on the pictures) often look like armatures or mannequins for displaying ethnic commodities, as Moorhouse seems to have piled layers of merchandise on them, including a trade blanket with its Pendleton Woolen Mills label clearly showing (figure 15). In another portrait, Tirzah Trask Umpqua Tribe, the Cayuse girl Ida Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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Coyote’s rigid pose, along with the expression of discomfort, if not resentment, on her face, register her resistance to being treated as a prop—a setup reinforced by the coiled-cedarroot mat on which Moorhouse placed her.53 The pictures illustrate the uneven power relations between the Native models and their Caucasian photographers, with the latter representing the encroaching white settlement and the dominant party in a socioeconomic system that dictated the terms of engagement.

In contrast, Matsura’s models were active

participants who sought the photographer’s services, as opposed to being photographed as subjects of ethnographic documentation. They stepped onto Matsura’s photographic stage—both the one in his studio and the one he set up on location—understanding that he would respect their representational choices. As Rayna Green points out, “when Indians wore ceremonial and traditional clothing, it was theirs, not something fancy and inappropriate that Matsura had dragged up out of his trunk for the photographic moment.”54 Their trust was helped, in part, by the minority status they shared with Matsura. But perhaps more 15 Lee Moorhouse, Wo-hopum, Cayuse Indian Woman, in Costume, 1897/1920. Photographic print, 6.6 × 8.54 in.

important, the trust was established by seeing Matsura’s willingness to show them “not only in their tribal dress (which he said they voluntarily wore to his studio), but also while wearing workclothes.”55 One seemingly casual photograph, Okanogan Baseball Team vs. Mission Team (ca. 1910), actually illustrates not only Native Americans as white settlers’ contemporary equals, but also the harmonious relationships between the Colville Indians and other locals in the form of a friendly baseball game (figure 16). Indistinguishable in their outfits, the players scatter around an open field whose location is suggested only by the background landscape dotted with cabins and teepees standing next to each other—more visual evidence of the coexistence of different ethnicities and cultures. Collectively, Matsura’s pictures capture the diversity and changes occurring in the local Indian communities—the kinds of visual representations that his Native American models appreciated and collaborated with him to produce.

What also distinguishes Matsura’s work is that he incorporates himself into the

portraits. The presence of the photographer is only implied in Curtis’s and Moorhouse’s pictures. Thus, both men’s visible absence allows the pictures to be consumed as naturalized imagery: we take them as “realistic” portrayals of the figures without the interference of seeing their Caucasian photographers and subsequently considering 26

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the disproportionate power and control that those behind the camera had.56 In Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio, on the other hand, Timento appears to be as much a partner in posing for the portrait as does Matsura, for she comfortably occupies an equal amount of the space within the picture, suggesting her anticipation of Matsura’s entry into the frame and premeditation on Matsura’s part in composing the image. In addition, in this and in many other portraits, Matsura and his models engage the imagined viewer with their gaze. This pronounced awareness of the camera enables us to read Matsura’s portraiture as (conscious) performance that takes place both in front of and behind the camera. This “authorial participation” demonstrates Matsura’s astute grasp and exploration of the tensions within photography’s assumed verisimilitude and performativity.

16 Frank Matsura, Okanogan Baseball Team vs. Mission Team, ca. 1910.

The photographic performance is prevalent in photographs of Matsura and

friends, especially the ones in which Matsura stepped in front of the camera. In a group portrait, Frank Matsura, Jessie Dillabough, Two Women, Matsura, and a Dog, Outdoors (ca. 1912), for example, Matsura is surrounded by three women whose attire suggests that this was intended to be a formal portrait, although the outdoor setting—note that they are sitting on a log—differs from the usual plain studio setup (figure 17). The composition of elaborately dressed figures placed in variously poses and expressions against a backdrop of out-of-focus trees and foliage gives the photograph a romantic quality that one might see in the works of pictorialists on either coast. But the odd juxtaposition of the women, a dog, and a somber-looking Japanese man (small in stature compared to the women) in the woods adds a sense of curiosity to the portrait. Dillabough’s skyward gaze and extended arms, which connect the flanking figures, the knowing gazes of the seated woman on the left and Matsura, and the blurred shutter release cable that extends from Matsura’s hand to the camera all suggest a conscious or careful setup for the shot. Indeed, there are other versions of the quartet (sans the dog in some) in the Matsura collections, and the group can be seen exploring different compositions and poses for various effects.57

Many of the studio portraits, taken with a camera that made stamp-sized multiple

exposures, show Matsura’s creative use of the camera not only for entertainment purposes, but also for capturing expressions of friendships that, in turn, become revealing pictures of relationships among the residents of Okanogan. In one session, Matsura’s good friend Mathilda Schaller and an unidentified young woman perform a series of poses as if they were lovers or close friends (figure 18). Schaller wears an embroidered blouse and her friend a trendy suit. While both outfits represent fashionable choices for women at the time, they provide a visual contrast between arguably more “feminine” Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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17  Frank Matsura, Jessie Dillabough, Two Women, Matsura and a Dog, Outdoors, ca. 1912.

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and “masculine” designs. That contrast is played out in the women’s varying poses as well, including ones in which they take turns acting as the (dominant/strong) one who comforts or offers support to the other. They are later joined by another man and Matsura himself, with the photographer playing a naughty intruder between the women, who, in the last shot of the series, seemingly succumb to his charm and embrace.

In another set of photographs, Matsura and

Norma Dillabough, Matsura and Dillabough, whose parents owned the Elliot Hotel, where Matsura was a handyman, run through a gamut of expressions that seem to portray them as young lovers: they embrace, play, and even fight (see figure 2). The quartet of images in the upper right corner represents a play on opposites and reversals, as Matsura and Dillabough not only switch sides but also swap roles as the active/ dominant figure. While Matsura (in a bowler hat) performs an admiring man’s gesture of lifting a woman’s chin to make eye contact in one picture, Dillabough returns the favor in another by making the same gesture toward Matsura, now wearing the same flat cap that is almost falling off Dillabough’s head in the other picture. Matsura’s awkwardly placed and tentative finger in the former, and his suppressed smile and rigid body in the latter, contrast with other, more naturalistic portraits; in one they sit calmly with locked arms, and in another they sit with their bodies leaning against each other. Throughout the twenty photographs in this set, they role-play and

18 Frank Matsura, Mathilda Schaller, Matsura, and Friends, ca. 1911.

perform for the camera variations of a (faux) couple’s dynamic interactions, which seemingly conclude with a shot of them coyly shielding their kiss from the imagined viewer’s—and society’s—prying eyes.

These photographs belie the kind of social decorum that respectable women and

men were expected to follow. Matsura’s physical interactions with his female sitters would not have been appropriate to display elsewhere, and he was known as a gentleman who was “circumspect in his relationships with women.”58 Bessie Misel (later Mrs. Claude Mills) recalled that Matsura, a bachelor who ate most of his meals at Mrs. Charles Lindsay’s restaurant, where Misel worked as a waitress, “always waited to be invited” to join other young men at a table. By extension, one could imagine the decorous distance Matsura would keep between other women and himself.59 However, although he was said to request that his female sitters have a chaperone when entering Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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19 Frank Matsura, Dollie Graves and Pearl Rasilbarth at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1911. 20 Frank Matsura, Two Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1912.

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his studio, his portraits indicate that within the confines of his studio social norms could be temporarily suspended. From cradling a woman’s face and draping his arm around her shoulders to forming a tight-knit trio with other women (or men), Matsura was physically intimate with his sitters. One assumes that Matsura and his models understood photography’s permanence and perceived “truth,” yet they still participated in extensive and carefree playacting that the public might not have approved of. Their photographic performances, as shown in the portraits, thus suggest that Matsura’s studio was considered to be a safe space that was dissociated, for a few moments, from the regulatory paradigm of the social norm. Matsura’s studio served as a kind of photographic borderland (the fringe), demarcated by Matsura and friends, in a borderland town.60

It is also important to note, however, that Matsura’s playful portraits may in fact

reflect a higher degree of “truth” than those formal and somewhat idealized portraits. Particularly revealing are the visual manifestations of fluid male-female/dominantsubmissive relations, enacted for the camera, that defy social expectations or rules. The aforementioned Schaller/Dillabough/Matsura and friends pictures are only a few of many stamp photos in which Matsura’s sitters explore and subvert, intentionally or not, a wide range of conventional gender types. Some examples worth noting, such as Dollie Graves and Pearl Rasilbarth at Matsura’s Studio (ca. 1911) and Two Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio (ca. 1912), go further in their expressions of intimacy by showing actual same-sex kissing (figures 19 and 20). While the women’s lips meet in a somewhat restrained way, the young men share a passionate embrace and a kiss so deep that their faces are buried in shadow. To be sure, props such as hats, bonnets, and pipes are almost always present to signify the conventional gender roles that the models are representing—as if ensuring that a potential viewer will not confuse playacting with reality. For example, Pearl Rasilbarth’s bowler hat marks her “male” role, whereas Dollie Graves is hatless and her lacy blouse highlights her “femininity,” at least for the purposes of visual contrast. One of the kissing men dons a bonnet to be the “woman” in the picture, which would supposedly help explain or even justify, to a casual viewer, his locking lips with another man. But considering the models’ candor, spontaneity, and unequivocal recognition of the camera (and the imagined viewer), the perceived “naturalism” in the same-sex role-playing captured by Matsura suggests that such expressions of intimacy may have been honest glimpses of these borderland residents’ reality and relationships.

As historian Peter Boag and other scholars have demonstrated, the existence of

cross-dressers, transsexuals, and homosexuals was a fact that the historical construction of the “American West” myths in the twentieth century had ignored, omitted, or suppressed. It was more pervasive than exceptional for men (and women) to engage in same-sex sexual activities, and, in many cases, women passed as men for their entire adult lives without anyone’s knowledge. Contrary to the rigid, two-sex binary system that was perpetuated and reinforced in historical narratives or even scholarly works, the reality of the frontier, Boag points out, was much more nuanced, varied, and ambiguous when it came to sexual and gender identities.61 This may explain the Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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apparent comfort and joy in role-playing among Matsura’s models, who may have been revealing some of the truth of their relationships under the guise of photographic horseplay. And indeed, other Matsura pictures appear to support and illustrate the fluidity of gender representations that Boag has uncovered. In addition to the studio portraits, Matsura photographed women in drag, as in A Woman in Drag Sits on a Stoop and Smokes Cigar (ca. 1910) (figure 21), and women proudly displaying their capability of performing jobs predominantly associated with men.62

Matsura’s portrayals of active and independent

women are not surprising, considering the progressive views on women that he expressed in an Okanogan Record article in 1905. Entitled “Education of the Japanese Women,” Matsura’s piece, published during the Russo-Japanese War, begins with praise of Japan’s achievements as a rising power, particularly in light of the nation’s “brilliant victories” against a “gigantic foe for the sake of justice and right.” Japan’s strength and success can be attributed, as Matsura argues, to a long tradition of strong and virtuous women raising generations of patriotic sons who bravely and skillfully defended their nation. But Japanese women were not merely mothers. They were men’s equals, Matsura asserts: “The oldest Japanese records invariably record that women were regarded as equal to men in every respect; they enjoyed the same consideration and rights as men,” and women were well-versed in both literature and “military tactics and arts.” As such, women and men all contributed to the development of a modern Japan, and “respect for deities, purity, resoluteness, faithfulness, and loyalty were necessary qualities that made up womanhood,” qualities that an upstanding man was expected to possess as well.63 One could perhaps credit Matsura’s uncle (and adopted father), a polymath and 21 Frank Matsura, A Woman in Drag Sits on a Stoop and Smokes Cigar, ca. 1910.

teacher at a girls’ school, for Matsura’s progressive views on Japanese women, traditionally regarded as “sinful by nature . . . and inferior beings by birth,” as Matsura points out. Judging by his varied representations of femininity, which extend beyond the customary domesticity, it is also clear that Matsura developed and maintained his own ideas of women as men’s equal and modern partners in his new hometown.

Furthermore, by participating in the pictorial role-playing himself, Matsura dis-

turbed the conventional power relationships between not only men and women, but the photographer (active/in control) and the subject (passive/in submission). He, as a picture maker who was also a minority/émigré, had implied dominance over his photographic subjects of both whites and nonwhites—a reversal of the Caucasian frontier photographer/minority subject power paradigm. But by stepping in front of 32

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the camera himself, he complicated the picture of a place where whites and nonwhites appear to live, and play, equally and happily together. Within his pictorial construct, a level playing field for different genders and races was created, in addition to the “momentary class transgression” that Harpster rightly describes in her thesis. Going Native American One could argue that Matsura’s pictures are critical, too, in that they go against the dominant race narratives concerning visual representations of Native communities. One sees indications of his rapport with Native Americans in various candid shots. In one set of stamp photos, Matsura poses with Miss Cecil Jim, a Methow Indian also known as Cecil Chiliwhist, and a group of young men (figure 22). Miss Jim appears in three photographs with Matsura, who sits snugly next to her. She poses with another young man, displaying body language that suggests a close friendship between them, including his touching her hand in one picture and draping his arm around her shoulder in another. In one shot, Miss Jim not only lets the man hold her close to him, but also appears to be sitting on his lap. In a separate quartet of photographs, Matura and Miss Jim are in varying forms of embracing (figure 23). Although their outfits and faces highlight their differences, their bodies are closely connected. The last picture, in which they share a blanket in a gesture of friendship and intimacy, illustrates the special bond between an American Indian and a Japanese immigrant, in a borderland where they are both a minority and simultaneously native and alien.

The blanket brings us back to the portrait of Matsura and Timento, Cecil Jim’s

aunt.64 Here the blanket is not shared but rather wrapped around Matsura’s body. Different from other lighthearted, candid shots, this looks like a formal portrait with gravitas. That seriousness implies a degree of intentionality in Matsura’s representation of a seemingly interracial “couple,” and points to more critical issues that the photographer perhaps wanted to interrogate through this portrait. It also foregrounds Matsura’s astute understanding and deployment of photography as a productive medium through which to engage broader sociopolitical questions in his host country.

First, the image calls attention to the vexed history and symbolism of the blanket.

It should be considered as more than a random prop in Matsura’s studio because of the way he deliberately incorporates it into constructing this picture, and because it does not appear in his portraiture as frequently as do the recurring flat cap and the bowler hat. The blanket most likely came from one of the two woolen mills—Pendleton and Racine—that manufactured “trade blankets,” as they are known.65 The blankets featured designs inspired by Native American textiles, but they were produced by non-Native companies and sold to Indian traders, from whom various tribes would purchase the blankets. Native American communities eventually embraced and incorporated trade blankets into their lives and cultures. In fact, the blanket, or “robe,” came to represent “a standard of exchange, a measure of wealth and standing, even a medium to express emotion and meaning”—see Moorhouse’s portrait of Chief Joseph, for example. The manners in which men and women wore the robe corresponded Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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to the particular emotions or moods that they wished to express. To own, cherish, or gift a blanket became a vital part of Native American cultures, for the blanket was omnipresent in a person’s important life events, such as weddings, deaths, and tribal ceremonies.66

The blanket also took on negative

symbolism, however, being construed by assimilationists to be a signifier of Native Americans’ perceived resistance to becoming “integrated” or “productive” members of society. For example, doing away with wearing blankets was represented by a local Okanogan reporter as a sign of the “thrift and industry” that Native Americans had developed: “They have ceased to wear blankets and have gone to work. . . . Take away his big reservation and his blanket; give him a share of the reservation to own as an individual farm, from which to make his live; and absorb him into the community as a part of it: make him work or starve and there will be no more Indian problem.”67 The writer speciously equated blanket-wearing with a lack of motivation to earn a living because of a perceived reliance on the government’s allocation of Indian reservations. The simplistic statement ignored the history of the U.S. government’s promulgation of expansionary laws since the 22 Frank Matsura, Matsura, Cecil Jim, and Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1910.

1880s. Passed by Congress under the pretext of protecting the livelihood and customs of Native Americans, these acts continuously claimed vast areas of land and natural resources by redrawing boundaries of Indian lands, and forced Native communities to relocate and resettle in reservations, which were also moved and reduced in size over the years. Removing the blanket nevertheless went hand in hand with the U.S. government’s “Americanization” policies—intended to “absorb him into the community as a part,” as the writer put it—among them using land-allotment negotiations to encourage (and coerce) Native Americans to become U.S. citizens, which would lead to their giving up tribal self-government and institutions.68

A major component of the “Americanization” project was the education of the

younger Native population. Even though schools providing education to American Indian youth had existed for some time, it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that boarding schools for Indian children began to proliferate throughout the country, with help from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. The majority of the schools, which numbered around 150 by 1900, used an assimilationist approach 34

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modeled on the U.S. Training and Industrial School, founded by Captain Richard H. Pratt in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Pratt was known for his infamous “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” proclamation, often misquoted as “kill the Indian, save the man.” Although he was actually advocating “citizenizing and absorbing” Indians, erasing any “Indian-ness” within them, in order to help them become integrated, “industrious and self-motivating” members of America,69 his proposal was highly problematic. He offered a rather wishful, patronizing, not to mention unsubstantiated “proof” of how an assimilationist approach would succeed: “Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible—probable—citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.”70 Speaking like a true colonialist, Pratt extolled the “virtues” of slavery by claiming that it had saved 7 million Africans from living among their “fellow savages” (his words) and given them an environment (a “free and

23 Frank Matsura, Matsura and Miss Cecil Chiliwhist, ca. 1910.

enlightened America”) in which they became “English-speaking and civilized because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people; became healthy and multiplied, because they were property; and industrious, because industry, which brings contentment and health, was a necessary quality to increase their value.”71 Underlying Pratt’s justification for slavery was a fallacious view of Africans as commodities whose “value” had been improved thanks to being sold and moved to the United States. Following a similarly racist belief, Pratt’s Native American education model aimed at thoroughly “Americanizing” the children by severing their ties with their tribes: they were forced to live far away from their families, in addition to changing their Indian names, appearance, and languages.

In his portrait with Timento, Matsura

appears to go against the assimilationist push and “Americanize” himself by becoming Indian. He chose to “go native,” albeit only on film; or, more precisely, he assumed a hybrid persona that was simultaneously Asian (or “Oriental,” the adjective used at the time), as indicated by his visible and unaltered face, and “Indian,” signified by the blanket that envelops and transforms his body. By layering (literally) a signifier Going “Native” in an American Borderland

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of difference/minority on top of his difference/minority as a Japanese alien, Matsura creates a multivalent image that serves as a gesture of solidarity, an expression of alliance between an immigrant and a racial minority group that was facing multiple assaults on its members’ lives and existence.

In addition, by “playing couple” with a Methow woman and visually articulating

his sense of belonging with the disenfranchised, Matsura’s portrait also poses a challenge to his (imagined) viewer: the implied intimacy or union in the picture references the contentious issue of miscegenation—the word first appeared in 1863, during the American Civil War, and seems to have been coined then. As Jolie A. Sheffer points out in her book on miscegenation and multiculturalism in the United States, proponents of the “melting pot” model for creating a new American identity, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, who conceived of the nation as a “people of mixed blood,” had in mind only the approved mixing among European immigrants: “Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Jews, Germans, Italians, and so on,” as specified by philosopher Horace Kallen in an article in the Nation in 1915. In other words, while the “pot” (society and territory) included nonwhites, the “melting” part excluded racial minorities outside of ethnic whites. And although there were visible exogamous unions in the early twentieth century, interracial coupling or marriage “provoked widespread anxiety” among white Americans,72 caused by the fact that miscegenation blurred boundaries between races and promised to upset an established social order maintained by the white majority (supremacy). The threat was deemed so real that antimiscegenation laws were enacted between the 1660s and the 1960s to criminalize interracial marriage and sex.73

According to the historian Peggy Pascoe, forty-one states and colonies in the

United States passed miscegenation laws at one time or another. Earlier laws focused on separating whites from blacks, but by the early twentieth century “12 states targeted American Indians, 14 [included] Asian Americans (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans), and 9 [included] ‘Malays’ (or Filipinos)” in their bans.74 Miscegenation remained a highly contested issue, often fought most visibly on the legal front, across the country. Many states eventually legalized interracial marriage, and the 1967 Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional.75

In 1868, Washington was the first state in the continental West to repeal its anti-

miscegenation law. Passed in 1855, that law made it illegal for whites to marry either blacks or Indians under a strict “blood purity” measurement that encompassed those who “possessed of one-fourth or more negro blood, or more than one-half Indian blood.” Those who “officiated an interracial marriage” would be fined between fifty and five hundred dollars.76 However, the adjacent states and their neighbors, including Oregon, California, and Nevada to the south and Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming to the east, had antimiscegenation laws in place as early as 1850 that lasted almost a century before they were repealed. In California, for example, the first of those states to pass such a law, the Supreme Court of California finally struck down interracial bans on marriage in 1948, thanks to the case Perez v. Sharp.77 Interracial couples would travel long distances to get married,78 and residents in Okanogan and elsewhere in the state would have been well aware of the impact of these laws. The regulation of interracial 36

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sex and marriage in Washington remained a controversial issue, as the legal historian Jason A. Gillmer reminds us.79

As a Japanese man, Matsura was legally free to have a relationship with or marry an

Indian woman, though there has been no proof of his having courted or partnered with any women, Native, Japanese, or white.80 There is also no visual record that interracial couples actually had their portraits taken in Matsura’s studio. Matsura’s self-portrait with Timento was thus not to be taken as a “real” portrait but instead as a pictorial construct: a performance through which both Matsura and Timento raised real questions of the day. The heterosexual pairing in the photograph points to a possibility of procreation, and with procreation comes the promise of posterity. With Timento’s quiet determination and Matsura’s concerned look, the (pretend) couple seems to ask, What would become of us and of our offspring? Viewed against the backdrop of a dominant “vanishing race” narrative, with its underlying assimilationist erasure of difference, the portrait seems to offer an alternative for a Native American posterity, achievable by joining forces among the racial minorities—an alliance between Others. The portrait most touchingly illustrates, I think, Matsura’s close relationship and identification with his Native American friends in Okanogan. But it is also a poignant image, for it is a photographic fiction of sorts, of posterity that exists solely in pictures, as Matsura’s knowing gaze seems to acknowledge. And in hindsight, the 1912 portrait became an image of posterity for Matsura, who died a bachelor at the age of thirty-nine.

This chapter has offered a close reading of Matsura’s portraiture by framing his

photography as a diasporic artist’s critical means of engagement with a borderland and its people. Considered in this context, Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio emerges as a multivalent visual statement produced by an astute image-maker whose work predates our identity-conscious visual production vis-à-vis issues of migration and diasporas. As such, Matsura’s extensive oeuvre invites and merits more scholarly attention.

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By Proxy of His Black Heroes

Eitarō Ishigaki and the Battles for Equality

2

In 1932, artist Eitarō Ishigaki (1893–1958) created an oil painting titled The Bonus March (figure 24). Standing nearly five feet tall and three and a half feet wide, the picture depicts a towering black figure cradling a Caucasian-looking figure, whose limp body drapes over the muscular arm of his rescuer, his right fist tightly clenched and raised. Centrally positioned, the figures’ shirtless, interlocking torsos form a triangle that dominates the image. Encroaching on this pair, however, are two men in uniform on the left and a tank with its gun aimed threateningly at the black figure’s head. He appears to face the approaching forces with unflinching determination, and the plainly dressed people behind him on the right seem to echo his action, forming a united front.1

A work that attests to Ishigaki’s superb draftsmanship, The Bonus March may, at

first glance, appear similar to other American paintings produced during the 1920s and ’30s. The sculptural modeling of the faces, the meticulous shading that highlights the central figures’ musculature, and the compact composition all seem to reflect an aesthetic that flourished in the New Deal era, as evident in the public art projects by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), established in 1935 as part of the Roosevelt administration’s effort to combat unprecedented economic devastation throughout the country. The subject matter of social unrest also places The Bonus March within the tradition of so-called American social realism, produced in the same decades, for the painting’s title refers to a historical event underlined by economic and sociopolitical struggles. Ishigaki depicts a critical moment in World War I veterans’ famous march into Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1932 to demand that the U.S. government, in a time of severe economic difficulties, distribute the promised “bonus checks” to compensate for their wartime services. The pictorial representation of the working class fighting for their rights and welfare, often against the capitalistic establishment, often appeared in the artistic production of many American progressives and leftists in the 1920s and ’30s.2 However, The Bonus March is unusual in the American social realist context in several respects. Ishigaki, a Japanese artist who lived and worked in the United States

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24 Eitarō Ishigaki, The Bonus March, 1932. Oil on canvas, 56.9 × 41.7 in.

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between 1909 and 1952, is an unfamiliar name to many who are well-versed in pre– World War II American art. The painting raises immediate questions of who the artist is and why a Japanese immigrant would paint a large canvas about the mass demonstration by American veterans. A cursory search in most English-language publications on American art produced in the interwar years yields little dedicated analysis of the artist’s artistic production or individual works.3 A short Ishigaki biography appears in Asian American Art; the same volume includes Tom Wolf’s essay “The Tip of the Iceberg: Early Asian-American Artists in New York,” which offers a biographical sketch in relation to Ishigaki’s artwork. In addition to a few brief appearances in Andrew Hemingway’s Artists on the Left, Yukiko Koshiro’s “Beyond an Alliance of Color: The African American Impact on Modern Japan” mentions Ishigaki’s political activism without analyzing his imagery. But by and large, Ishigaki remains a little-known figure in modern American art history.4

Ishigaki was far from being an unknown artist in pre–World War II New York

art circles, however. Both Hemingway and Wolf point out that Ishigaki was not only an established artist but also a founding member of progressive and politically active organizations, including the John Reed Club (JRC) in 1929 and the American Artists Congress in 1936. The JRC was the cultural arm of the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA), in charge of staging and sponsoring events featuring visual, literary, and performing arts that helped advance revolutionary and/or proletarian causes through its various branches spread across the nation. The Congress was one of the largest national artist collectives that had the dual objective of taking a clear antifascism stance against the fascist regimes in Europe and promoting artists’ financial well-being so that they could maintain critical independence without succumbing to the corruptive influences of the capitalists in power—essentially another form of “fascism,” in the participating artists’ view.5 The two organizations, in addition to a few others, offered Ishigaki productive forums in which he was able to engage in activism through art and find camaraderie and critical recognition. Ishigaki was also a regular exhibitor in the Society of Independent Artists exhibitions, showing works annually between 1925 and 1934 (save for 1932), and held two solo exhibitions at the progressive ACA (American Contemporary Art) Gallery in 1936 and 1940 that garnered critical acclaim. For instance, the Pulitzer-winning art critic Emily Genauer, reviewing Ishigaki’s ACA show in 1936, praised his special ability to “weave forms into the most intricate compositions imaginable . . . with great gain in vigorous, broad rhythms.” Genauer likely had Ishigaki’s War Tractor (1936) in mind, among others, a dynamic composition that illustrates the strength and defiance of the people against the oppressive war machine (figure 25). Rendered in the nude—a classical artistic reference that Ishigaki deployed as a representational device throughout his oeuvre—the pile of human bodies highlights the contrast between metal and flesh, signals the casualties of the conflict and the unarmed masses’ vulnerability, and foregrounds the courage of those who persist in fighting back, as seen in the man’s raised fist and his mouth, wide open to shout defiance, as well as the full-length figure’s seemingly improbable action of resisting a crushing “tractor.” 40

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25  Eitarō Ishigaki, War Tractor, 1936. Oil on canvas, 46.1 × 56.5 in.

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Reviewing the same exhibition, art critic Melville Upton of the New York Sun found

that Ishigaki was “seemingly as American as the next without generations on the soil back of him,” an implicit endorsement of the artist’s integration into American society and culture.6 Upton’s praise of Ishigaki’s American character points up another unusual aspect concerning Ishigaki’s artistic production: a painting such as The Bonus March would likely change a viewer’s expectation of what the art of a Japanese émigré artist from this period looks like. Rather than ink and brush, or paintings of nature, which his contemporary critics might expect to see in the work of artists of Asian descent, Ishigaki used oil paint, and chose figuration and the language of realism as his preferred means for creating imagery that engaged sociopolitical issues being fought along the ideological fault lines in America. Writing for the Daily Worker, a New York–based newspaper published by the CPUSA since 1924, Jacob Kainen indeed opined that “America predominates over Japan” in Ishigaki’s paintings. But more importantly, Kainen proclaimed that Ishigaki’s artistic excellence forcefully repudiated the xenophobic claims of “racial theorists” who refused to believe that non-Americans (nonwhites) could produce American art.7

What further distinguishes The Bonus March is Ishigaki’s choice to represent and

foreground a heroic black figure, instead of following many of his progressive compatriots’ depictions of African Americans as passive victims of racism. As this pictorial strategy indicates, Ishigaki articulated his sociopolitical views from an ideological position that separates his work somewhat from that of other American social realists. That is to say, Ishigaki’s protest against inequality and racism was, in part, informed by his personal experience and intimate understanding of the status of minorities and the marginalized within a society that was unable to fulfill its democratic ideals of liberty and equal rights for all. In effect, by proxy of his black heroes, Ishigaki created The Bonus March and other similar works as pictorial proclamations and affirmations of his solidarity with the socioeconomically disenfranchised and of a humanistic camaraderie extending beyond racial boundaries and societal conventions—an “alliance beyond color,” to borrow Yukiko Koshiro’s phrase.

Historians and scholars in ethnic studies have examined the cross-racial affinity (at

times ambivalent and complicated) that has historically been part of the long-standing sense of solidarity between blacks and Asians. My investigation of Ishigaki’s imagery of African Americans serves to contribute to the significant body of critical literature on the complex, collaborative, and ambivalent historical relationship between black Americans and Asian Americans.8 Ishigaki’s work illuminates a kind of “transracial” positioning in his visual rhetoric that I regard as complementary to that which Matsura articulated in his photographic portraiture with Native Americans, and that of Hideo Noda’s pictorial proclamation of a shared, universal struggle against racism and injustice, discussed in the next chapter. Forming a Progressive Alliance with the Labor (Under)Class An economic factor was the driving force behind the “Bonus Army,” as the D.C. marchers were called. The demonstration organizers had hoped that the presence 42

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of more than twenty thousand unemployed veterans at the doorstep of the nation’s capital would persuade, and pressure, the U.S. Congress to pass a bill requiring immediate payment of veterans’ adjusted compensation certificates, valued at one thousand dollars each. The certificates, awarded by Congress in 1924, were not redeemable until 1945, but the veterans thought President Hoover and the government could allow them to cash in early to help them stay afloat in dire economic straits. The wait for Congress to decide on the bill resulted in the marchers’ prolonged encampment in the Anacostia area near Capitol Hill in “Hoovervilles,” as their makeshift camps were called. As the marchers’ stay lengthened, criticism from various quarters of society grew. The most publicized and arguably damning voices came from those who accused the marchers of succumbing to the manipulation of communist agitators among them. The Hoovervilles, it was believed, became a hotbed of so-called undesirable elements, namely members of the Communist Party. In the press, the most common headlines concerning the march referred to “reds,” and many critics called for the marchers to purge those elements. Historians have since reconstructed a more nuanced picture of the various, sometimes ideologically conflicting factions among the marchers, including the fact that the marchers themselves were weary of the communist members and at one point “expelled” several of them and even surrendered some to the police.9 In the end, opponents of the march pressured the Hoover administration to take action to dissolve the encampment, precipitating the D.C. authorities’ eventual clash with the marchers (figure 26).

26 Bonus Army shacks burning, Anacostia Flats, 1932. The makeshift shacks were set ablaze during the forced removal. It was unclear how the fire was started, but the image of raging fires destroying the marchers’ camp, with the Capitol Building looming in the distance became an iconic illustration of the government’s use of force against its defenseless citizens. National Archives.

Referred to also as the “Bonus Incident,” this historic mass demonstration cap-

tivated the nation’s attention in 1932 and fueled the artistic production of American progressives and leftist intelligentsia, with whom Ishigaki had long been allied. The eventual confrontation between the unarmed veterans and the government’s overpowering show of force provided artists yet another example of the perceived refusal of the establishment (thought to be controlled by capitalist profiteers) to take care of its economically disadvantaged people and of its blatant disregard for their political disenfranchisement. In The Bonus March, Ishigaki included all the actors involved in the conflict: the marchers, the men in uniform, and the tank, representing the D.C. police and the U.S. Army troops, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, then the army’s chief of staff. MacArthur was said to have proceeded with the removal of the marchers from the Anacostia area by force despite President Hoover’s concern over his administration being perceived as acting too harshly. The protesters could not match the firepower of the troops; numerous veterans were injured, and several were killed.10 In Ishigaki’s representation of the confrontation, the Capitol Building By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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hovers in the distance above the tank, the policeman, and the soldier, all of which form a line of defense and a barrier that physically and symbolically prevents the marchers from gaining access to the government. The inclusion of the Capitol serves as a visual indictment of the U.S. government’s role in sanctioning the deployment of military forces against its unarmed citizens and, even more egregious, its own former soldiers.

However, instead of focusing solely on decrying an oppressive regime—a common

theme in the imagery of many American social realists, including Ishigaki himself, Ishigaki deployed a different pictorial strategy in The Bonus March by foregrounding (literally) and exalting courageous fighters. While he alludes to the casualties of the violent conflict by including a fallen man cradled in the arms of the heroic black comrade, he also pictorially minimizes the power of the army, the police, and the tank by relegating them to the upper-left corner of the canvas. The soldier in the brown uniform and his rifle (bayonets and sabers were reportedly deployed by MacArthur’s troops) are partially obscured by the muscular torsos in the foreground. Without a face-to-face confrontation and with a pose that suggests the soldier’s turning away from the scene, Ishigaki renders him even less menacing. By placing the imposing central figure between the police and the marchers (in terms of the composition), Ishigaki allows his resolute presence to diffuse any impending threat. Contrary to the actual ultimate defeat and dispersal of the marchers, Ishigaki shows the side of the demonstrators as dominant—it takes up two-thirds of the canvas—and thus symbolically victorious. In other words, The Bonus March serves a subjective interpretation and pictorial intervention that valorizes the disenfranchised who stand up for their democratic rights.

Additional formal choices reinforce Ishigaki’s representation of an idealized (or

wishful) version of the actual event. In addition to confining the encroaching forces to the tight space in the corner, he surrounds the central figures with a ring of lighter shadings. Beyond suggesting a spatial separation between the main characters and the other figures, this painterly device renders the central figures, especially the imposing black man, as light-emitting beings, or at least makes them appear to be surrounded by a visible aura. The pyramidal shape that the interlocking torsos form is somewhat reminiscent of the tradition of the Pietà, sculptures or paintings that show a largerthan-life Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless but often muscular body of Jesus Christ after the Crucifixion.11 The shirtless and muscular bodies also carry classical (religious) art references, resembling the heroic male nudes seen in Michelangelo’s oeuvre. One could argue that the nakedness functions as Ishigaki’s universalizing device to transcend cultural specificity and highlight the strength of the figures; it also reinforces the notion of homosocial camaraderie that Ishigaki perceived the largely male demonstrators to have created during their long and arduous march and encampment.12 These visual elements imbue the interpretation of a chaotic and likely fatal moment with a spiritual undertone that further elevates Ishigaki’s African American figure to the status of an exalted warrior.

The march appears to have affected Ishigaki in a personal way. He was said to have

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was living in New York at the time, and his next-door neighbor was a World War I veteran. An opera-singing bachelor who was generally indifferent to sociopolitical events, the neighbor, in the midst of a June heat wave, abruptly abandoned his business as a dressmaker to join the marchers in D.C. Moved by the actions of the veterans, Ishigaki quickly and passionately completed the painting toward the end of that summer.13

Ishigaki’s support for the demonstrating veterans, many of whom had reentered

the labor force after the war, was also more than a sympathetic gesture, for he strongly and intimately identified with the working class due to his own immigrant background. Having emigrated to the United States in 1909 to join his father, a migrant worker in Bakersfield, California, Ishigaki experienced America, as many Asian immigrants did at that time, through performing underpaid, physically punishing itinerant work along the Pacific Coast. While still a teenager, Ishigaki worked as a day laborer for fruit farmers, a busboy at restaurants with a Mexican laborer clientele, and sometimes a hotel cleaner, in Seattle, Bakersfield, and San Francisco. In a series of autobiographical essays published in 1952 in Chūō-kōron (the Central Review), Ishigaki vividly recalled living in 120-degree heat near Chinatown in Bakersfield, where some six hundred prostitutes paraded their scantily clad bodies in front of a babelic community of multinational laborers. He was introduced to literature on socialism at the same time he was studying the Bible at a Christian church. His full exposure to Marxist and socialist thought came after he moved to live with his aunt in San Francisco in 1912, reportedly because of heightened tensions among residents of Japanese descent in Bakersfield, between those who advocated assimilation into American society, with whom Ishigaki allied, and those who upheld staunch Japanese nationalistic views.14

In the spring of 1914, Ishigaki met Sen Katayama (1859–1933) in San Francisco.

Their friendship would last nearly two decades. Katayama—“Japan’s first Bolshevik” as historian Hyman Kublin calls him—was a unique figure in Japanese political history. He was a pioneer in sociopolitical radicalism and the labor movement, including organizing Japan’s first Social Democratic Party. As Daryl J. Maeda and Vijay Prashad have pointed out, Katayama played a pivotal role in the founding of not only the Japanese Communist Party but the CPUSA.15 On his third sojourn in the United States when Ishigaki met him, Katayama was regarded as an influential political activist among small groups of Japanese immigrants in San Francisco and, in 1917, New York, where Ishigaki lived from 1915 to 1952. Ishigaki recalled that Katayama studied books such as Karl Marx’s Capital on “a desk made from orange crates” while working as one of a group of Japanese day laborers in San Francisco. Ishigaki also wrote that Katayama strongly identified with the workers: “He was not sympathetic to the work performed by laborers from the perspective of a different class of people. He was a laborer himself,” for Katayama “worked as a cook in the house of a white man. The name of his occupation on his [Communist] party card was ‘cook,’” Ishigaki added.16 Katayama’s conviction to advocate for the welfare and rights of workers gave voice to (Asian) emigrant laborers, who were perceived to be taking jobs away from, and threatening the livelihood of, white Americans. The relationships between Asian and African American workers were also complicated. On the one hand, anti-Japanese and By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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27 Eitarō Ishigaki, Self-Portrait, 1917. Oil on canvas, 18.1 × 14.7 in. 28 Eitarō Ishigaki, Town (Processional—1925), 1925. Oil on canvas, 49.6 × 35.7 in.

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anti-Chinese sentiments could work in favor of directing job opportunities to black laborers. On the other hand, leaders in African American communities also recognized and advocated for solidarity and cooperation among minority workers to combat broader economic inequalities that people of color suffered.17 Katayama would become a mentor and father figure to Ishigaki, who would serve as the first editor of Katayama’s autobiography, published in the well-known Japanese journal Kaizō in 1922.

In his autobiographical essays, Ishigaki recalled a small contingent of Japanese

immigrants, with Katayama as their ringleader, that often gathered in Ishigaki’s studio. They not only socialized and bonded with fellow expatriates, but also discussed revolutionary events and ideas. Ishigaki and Katayama, along with Tsunao Inomata (1889–1942), Unzō Taguchi (1892–1933), and a few other compatriots who would become influential writers and socialists in Japan, studied Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917) chapter by chapter, with dictionaries in tow. It was their way of supporting, albeit in spirit, the series of revolutions taking place in Russia in 1917 that ultimately led to the establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. According to Ishigaki, Katayama urged him to take on the mission of becoming a “leader of revolution” by returning to Japan to establish schools that propagated Leninism—a piece of advice that Ishigaki did not follow.18

Like his mentor Katayama, Ishigaki identified himself as a worker even as he began

to study art at schools in San Francisco and later attended evening classes at the Art Students League in New York (figure 27).19 His instructors at the League included John Sloan (1871–1951), whose oeuvre of American urban genre paintings, rebellion against the conservative National Academy of Design, and twenty-two-year tenure at the League influenced Ishigaki and generations of artists. Incidentally, Sloan would later encounter Miki Hayakawa, the subject of the fourth chapter, in his drawing group in Santa Fe during his summer sojourns in New Mexico.20 The energetic brushwork that Sloan applied to his portrayals of ordinary people surviving their daily lives, some in the neglected corners of a bustling city, seems to have made an impact on Ishigaki. Using similarly broad and fluid brushstrokes in his early paintings, Ishigaki devoted a great deal of effort to depicting urban dwellers from vastly different economic and social circumstances encountering each other in often awkward situations, as seen in Town, originally titled Processional—1925 (figure 28), and Nuns and Flappers, both painted in 1925, and Jobless Music Band (also called Penny Musician) in 1928.21 However, Ishigaki went further by focusing on the conflicts, psychological and physical, between his subjects. For example, he called attention to the juxtaposition of fur-clad women and a handicapped man in Town. By placing the viewer on the receiving end of the unfriendly stares from the figures occupying the foreground, Ishigaki rendered visible society’s hostility toward people who are physically and economically disadvantaged and, in effect, admonished viewers to consider their own prejudices.

Ishigaki himself lived a life of economic hardship and marginal existence. Even

though he was able to participate in art shows throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and held two well-reviewed one-person exhibitions at the ACA Gallery, he never achieved any financial success in his career.22 It was partly because of his personal experience of By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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living in relative poverty that Ishigaki proclaimed, in an article about life in Greenwich Village, that “the poor and artists will always be related” because they live next door to each other and “the poor work with their muscles and artists work with their senses and physical strength.” In other words, artists and laborers are comrades in the same economic underclass. Ishigaki reminisced that he was always struggling to pay rent as he pursued his art career. At one point he decided to accept an offer from his friend Morris Strunsky to live rent-free for a year at his vacant apartment in Greenwich Village; Strunsky’s father, Albert “Papa” Strunsky, was a landlord well known for renting apartments to anyone who needed a space to live, regardless of their ability to afford it.23 He discovered only later that the apartment, located at 73 Horatio Street, could not retain any regular tenants because it sat in a ghetto where “dreadful odors floated up from the banks of the Hudson River” and “drunks and prostitutes lurked in the dark shadows of the tenements.” However, Ishigaki was able to make friends with hostile children by offering to draw their portraits, and eventually with other adults. Strunsky also correctly predicted that Ishigaki would make a positive impact on the neighborhood, as new renters, following his lead, moved in to fill up the building. As Ishigaki vividly recalled in one of his autobiographical essays, among the colorful residents was a young woman who enjoyed dancing in the nude in front of the mirror in her apartment. One of the neighbors approached Ishigaki about asking the lady to pull down her blinds, as young people from the area were crowding around every evening to watch her.24

There was more than one free-spirited woman in Ishigaki’s life, as it turns out,

who may have informed the recurring motif throughout his oeuvre of powerful female figures engaging in leading the charge against the invaders or (literally) overthrowing men. In fact, his lovers, friends, and neighbors included several remarkably progressive and politically active women who were influential figures in the twentieth-century American social history. Ishigaki lived in the apartment building at 246 West Fourteenth Street in New York, with Gertrude Farquharson Boyle Kanno (1876–1937), his lover at the time.25 Seventeen years his senior, Gertrude Boyle left her husband, Japanese poet-philosopher Takeshi Kanno (1877–unknown), in San Francisco in 1915 and moved to New York; Ishigaki followed (see figure 29; I believe this unidentified painting is a portrait of Gertrude Boyle, based on her facial features and hairstyle in photos taken with Kanno between 1910 and 1915). Their love triangle gained notoriety because the Kannos were well-known figures in California. Gertrude Boyle was a sculptor “of choice for the eminences grises of the day,” known for her portrait busts of Joaquin Miller (Takeshi lived at Miller’s Hights for over ten years), Mark Twain, John Muir, and Margaret Sanger, among others (figure 30).26 The domestic drama—Takeshi tracked down his wife and her lover, and reportedly lived not far from the couple’s apartment on Fourteenth Street—was made more scandalous by its interracial players against the backdrop of miscegenation laws. Gertrude and Takeshi reconciled in 1929, the same year that Ishigaki married his wife, Ayako Tanaka Ishigaki (石垣綾子, 1903–1996).27

Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879–1966), the pioneering and controversial advocate

of birth control, lived in the same apartment building with Ishigaki and Boyle from 1918 to 1921, and her sister, Ethel Byrne, occupied the unit above her. During this 48

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29  Eitarō Ishigaki, Head of a Woman, 1916. Oil on canvas, 10.8 × 8.3 in.

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period Sanger was diligently working to disseminate the Birth Control Review, a publication “Dedicated to the Principle of Intelligent and Voluntary Motherhood,” as its inaugural issue proclaimed in February 1917. Boyle worked for the magazine as an art editor for a few years. Ishigaki noted that Sanger was incredibly busy with her proselytizing tours across the country and establishing birth-control clinics and advocacy groups, including the American Birth Control League. He expressed great admiration for Sanger’s conviction even in the face of incessant legal and sociopolitical adversities, and their apartment building became a retreat for Sanger to seek respite and friendship. Ishigaki facilitated the publication of Sanger’s writings on birth control in the influential journal Kaizō in Japan, as well as her visit to Japan in 1922. It was also through Sanger’s introduction that Ishigaki met the writer H. G. Wells (1866–1946) and obtained the Japanese translation rights to Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923) for publication in Kaizō.28

Ishigaki also had unreserved praise for Agnes Smedley

(1892–1950), another frequent guest at the Ishigaki-Boyle apartment-studio. Smedley, a journalist and writer, was deeply involved in international political movements of the time, including Indian nationalists’ fight for independence, women’s rights (she briefly worked for Sanger’s Birth Control Review), and the Chinese communists’ revolutionary activities in the 1930s. Ishigaki remembered Smedley as a genuine and passionate woman, a “true artist” and an articulate “genius” who was much more “mature” than he was despite their similar ages. During the early Cold War years, she was charged with having served as a spy for the Soviet Union, an accusation that author Ruth Price’s research has shown to be true. In fact, Ishigaki and his wife, Ayako, faced multiple interrogations by the FBI in 1950 for their association with Smedley, and discovered that the Bureau had investigated 30 Bain News Service, Takeshi Kanno and Wife (Gertrude Farquharson Boyle Kanno), 1914. Glass negative, 5 × 7 in.

their activities in the United States in the previous decades. That realization caused the Ishigakis tremendous distress, as they feared forced deportation. When Smedley died in the United Kingdom on May 8, 1950, and a memorial meeting was held for her at the Friends Meeting House on Stuyvesant Square on May 18, the Ishigakis chose not to attend out of fear of attracting the FBI’s further scrutiny. The couple was heartbroken and cried a great deal, the Ishigakis recalled, when they imagined Smedley dying alone abroad. Years later, Ishigaki fondly remembered Smedley every time he saw morning glories, which used to adorn her home.29

The woman who had the longest relationship with Ishigaki was Ayako Ishigaki.

A socially engaged writer-activist, Ayako published an autobiography, Restless Wave: My Life in Two Worlds, in 1940 under her pseudonym “Haru Matsui.” One of the first 50

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English-language books by an émigré Japanese woman, it won her critical acclaim.30 In the book, with illustrations by Eitarō, she recounted her journey of growing up in a society that was too old-fashioned and repressive for her, as well as living in America, where she experienced loneliness, love, passion, and anxiety in the tumultuous decades of the 1930s and ’40s. She recalled her first visit to Eitarō’s Horatio Street apartment in 1927, feeling impressed by his paintings and finding “a companion with whom I could talk” for the first time since she left Japan, even though he was ten years her senior. Her description of the conclusion of their initial meeting is revealing of Eitarō’s respect for women: “Late that night he accompanied me home. A Japanese man walking on the street with a woman leaves her behind, even when crossing the street, and goes ahead unconcernedly by himself. But this man walked with me, by my side. I felt that he was a cross between American and Japanese.”31 This description also points to a degree of cross-cultural integration Eitarō had attained that appealed to Ayako. However, her decision to leave her relatives in Washington, move to New York City, and marry Eitarō was met with objections from her family members. Her father grudgingly permitted her marriage, but sent no customary words or gifts, save for a terse letter to Eitarō: “Although Haru is inordinately self-willed and inadequate, I would ask you to look after her in the long future.”

The Ishigakis stayed married for the rest of their lives, but suffered a grave loss

when their newborn daughter, barely ten days old, died in August of 1932. Sophie Gropper, the wife of Eitarō Ishigaki’s good friend and colleague, artist William Gropper (1897–1977), referred Ayako to a famous physician on Park Avenue to receive the best possible care and even invited her to stay in their spacious house in Crotonon-Hudson, New York. The Ishigakis returned to Japan in 1951, where Eitarō died in 1958 and Ayako in 1996, by then a famed feminist author and commentator who frequently appeared on television shows.32 In a May 1958 letter to their friends Virginia and Joseph Kaplan in New York, Ayako included an article she published after Eitarō’s death that recounted their thirty-year partnership and conveyed her love for a husband whose warmth and optimism inspired her: “You were a man who always could smile and find cheerfulness somewhere, even when you were in distress,” she told him, and even when Eitarō was hospitalized for arteriosclerosis in 1957, “You always kept your bright pleasantness and frank laughter for yourself. I was quite peaceful under the cover of your bright gentleness. I did not know that your death was just around the corner then.” Her loving tribute was indeed a testament to their enduring partnership, between a girl from Tokyo and a man from a whaling village in Taiji, Wakayama, who met on a cold January night in New York City in 1927.33

In a feature story about Ishigaki’s exhibition at the Japanese Artists’ Society in

1922, the New York Evening Telegram reporter quoted the artist’s observation that the average American woman was better educated and more cultured than the average American man. “She knows far more about literature and about art. She knows far more than the European woman or the Japanese woman,” Ishigaki proclaimed—a view, incidentally, that differs from Frank Matsura’s appraisal of modern Japanese women, as discussed in chapter 1. While American men went to college but learned By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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31 Eitarō Ishigaki, Resistance, 1937. Oil on canvas, 23.9 × 28.7 in.

little, “mention the name of a man of letters of America or from abroad to the American woman and instantly she knows of whom you are talking and can carry on an intelligent conversation with you about him.” One can attribute such an assessment to the remarkable women that Ishigaki had encountered. Strong and dominant women recur in his images, such as Resistance (1937), Spanish Woman (1938), and Resistance of Woman (1947), in which strong, Amazon-like heroines are seen battling and defeating their male adversaries (figure 31).

It was in this progressive and ideologically radical milieu that Ishigaki produced

many of his socially engaged works, including The Bonus March. The revolutionaries and activists who frequented his home and studio likely offered him years of intellectual, ideological, and political inculcation that formed the basis of his visual production. In his oeuvre, particularly the canvases produced in the 1930s, representations of defiant workers, powerful women, and the uprising of the oppressed predominate. Painting from the Left: New Masses and the John Reed Club The Bonus March indeed marked a pivotal period in Ishigaki’s artistic development, when he intensified his focus on producing imagery of the people’s sociopolitical struggles in a clearer, realist visual rhetoric. His earlier canvases already showed advocacy 52

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32 Eitarō Ishigaki, Boxing, 1925. Oil on canvas, 29.7 × 35.9 in.

for those who fought to earn a meager living, but in them he was exploring (not always successfully) semiabstraction as a pictorial language. For example, in Boxing (1925), the artist’s homage to the numerous boxing images that American artist George Bellows (1882–1925) created between 1909 and the 1920s, Ishigaki turned the muscular and bloody battle between the fighters into an entanglement of fluid lines and forms (figure 32). Boxers were often from the lower economic strata, and in Ishigaki’s stylized treatment they are faceless and thus anonymous. And while the referee’s and spectators’ faces are visible, they lack any identifiable features or individuality. A figurative painting, Ishigaki’s Boxing is nevertheless an exercise in abstraction that renders people as organic shapes of contrasting hues and tones.34

The hollow faces of the audience in Boxing also appear in Whipping (1925), orig-

inally titled The Whip (figure 33), but they are now further minimized in Ishigaki’s dramatization of the conflict between the oppressed labor class and the exploitative management.35 Dominating the canvas is an imposing figure straddling a menacing horse whose twisted, sinewy neck forms a curve that echoes the rider’s arched, muscular back and a long, curvilinear whip. The dark anonymous figures represent workers who are trapped by the ominous, factory-like structures that spew thick smoke. The horseman’s whipping gesture suggests that the person in charge is ready and willing to use force to squelch any unrest or resistance, reinforcing a depiction of active By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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33  Eitarō Ishigaki, Whipping (The Whip), 1925. Oil on canvas, 57.2 × 41 in.

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oppression of the laborers. It is, in Ishigaki’s own words, a painting with a “touch of Marxist class struggles.”36

Whipping was the earliest (and most abstract)

of Ishigaki’s known paintings that featured the motif of a whip-cracking or baton-brandishing horseman representing the oppressor. Ishigaki also featured such figures in subsequent works such as American Cossacks (originally titled Unemployment Demonstration), Revolt on the Island of Cuba (1933), and Uprising (1935). In American Cossacks, for instance, the policemen on large horses raise their batons and charge toward the unarmed demonstrators, whose overalls and caps identify them as workers. While forming a united front, the protestors, with only placards to defend themselves, are pushed to the far edge of the picture frame, a compositional choice that highlights the overwhelming force of law enforcement and the uneven power dynamic in the situation. In Revolt, Ishigaki shortened the distance between the man in a white outfit associated with European colonizers and the bare-chested, dark-skinned native, who is depicted in a gesture of resistance as he grabs the horseman’s collar and reins (figure 34). Unlike the figures in Whipping and American Cossacks, which have no discernible facial features, both figures in Revolt (as well as the horse) are rendered in clear detail, with their eyes given special attention. The horse in

34 Eitarō Ishigaki, Revolt on the Island of Cuba, 1933. Oil on canvas, 71.5 × 54.6 in.

Revolt is an almost identical but more representational reiteration of the stylized and seemingly mechanical horse in Whipping. And the musculature of both the horse and the defiant native in Revolt is similar to that of the central figures in Bonus March of the same year, indicating Ishigaki’s move toward a more realistic modeling of figures and forms in around 1932.

The shift toward a didactic realism in Ishigaki’s imagery had broader significance

beyond a personal stylistic change. It coincided with a specific historical moment in which American leftist artists and intelligentsia called for more effective visual and literary production that could better relate to and serve the masses vis-à-vis problems of socioeconomic inequality. This push for a new direction is best exemplified by the changes taking place within the pages of the leftist magazine New Masses, to which Ishigaki was a regular contributor. The existing scholarship on the history of New Masses rarely references Ishigaki or his work, save for Hemingway’s comprehensive survey. For instance, Susan Platt’s summary of graphics in New Masses mentions works by Gropper, Hugo Gellert, Mabel Dwight, and Bernarda Bryson, but none by By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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35 Eitarō Ishigaki, Soldiers of People’s Front (The Zero Hour), ca. 1936–37. Oil on canvas, 58.5 × 81.5 in. The date comes from the museum’s records, but the image appeared in New Masses in December 1936 and was thus created in 1936.

Ishigaki. In Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt’s seminal essay on New Masses and John Reed Club artists, Ishigaki is nowhere to be found, either.37 However, Ishigaki made his first appearance in New Masses as early as July 1929, three years after the first issue of the magazine was published in May 1926. A reproduction of Ishigaki’s oil painting Undefeated Arm (also titled Arm) was used as the cover. Rendered in a realist language, the open collar, rolled-up sleeves, bulging muscles, and lighter shading that surrounds the figure all highlight the strength of the worker. Omitting the face altogether, Ishigaki focuses the viewer’s attention on the determined grip of a hammer—a tribute to the labor class and a nod to the hammer-and-sickle symbol that had been adopted on the official flag of the Soviet Union since 1923.

Undefeated Arm launched Ishigaki’s years of contributions to New Masses, which

were by no means negligible. His Fight was the magazine’s June 1932 cover image. In addition to an illustration of workers on strike, captioned “may—U.S. workers demonstrate on May Day,” in the December 1930 issue, his Unemployed Demonstration appeared in the “Workers’ Art” section in February 1932, and was republished as American Cossacks in October 1935. Ku Klux Klan (1936), which accompanied a New Masses report of a Klan meeting in Atlanta in 1936, reappeared as South U.S.A. in the 56

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Daily Worker on March 9 of the same year. Additionally, New Masses published reproductions of Ishigaki’s Down with the Swastika (March 1936); The Zero Hour, also called Soldiers of People’s Front (December 1936) (figure 35); and Flight, alternatively titled Chinese Refugees (December 1937). There is no evidence to suggest that The Bonus March was created for New Masses, but its subject matter clearly corresponds to the kind of imagery that the magazine illustrated and promoted during that period.

New Masses provided a productive venue for leftist artists to showcase socially

engaged work, which in Ishigaki’s view was “avant-garde” in American art at the time.38 While New Masses had maintained an explicit alliance with the labor class since its inception, in its initial years it was ostensibly adamant about not proclaiming overt affiliation with any political party. In fact, its founders were contributors to the Liberator, a left-wing journal, who disagreed with the CPUSA takeover of the magazine in 1922 and decided to start their own magazine. However, while it was not an official CPUSA publication, many of its contributors were involved in, or associated with, the causes advanced by the party. The editors of and contributors to New Masses engaged in extensive debates on what constituted socially relevant art that could provide advocacy for the worker, as well as a sustained debate over the “relationship between artistic issues of technical skill and formal innovation and the more political issues of subject matter and ideology.”39 When Michael Gold, a communist writer who was one of the six original editors, took over as editor-in-chief in June 1928, he sharpened the publication’s focus on advancing labor causes through increasing the amount of explicitly political content in the magazine. Under Gold’s direction, New Masses strove to become a forum where workers contributed and showcased their writings and graphics, and it greatly foregrounded contributors’ working-class backgrounds, as opposed to their “professional standings” as artists.40 Gold also favored a type of “proletarian realism” with an accessible and straightforward style and subject matter that he perceived as better relating to the masses—precisely the kind of art that Ishigaki was beginning to produce during the same period.

The push to publish more revolutionary content in the magazine was connected

to a larger political impetus, most notably exemplified by a letter sent from Moscow by Bruno Jasieński, secretary to the International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW), on June 27, 1932. Jasieński opens the letter, “Resolution on the Work of the New Masses in 1931,” by declaring, “The Secretariat of the IURW places on record that the magazine made a whole series of achievements in its own reorganization, on the basis of fulfilling the decisions of the Kharkov International Conference of revolutionary writers.” At the Kharkov Conference, which took place in 1930, the American delegation to the conference had pledged to actively participate in all the important cultural and political campaigns in the United States. Jasieński acknowledged that since the conference “all the important strikes that took place in America in 1931 were mirrored on the pages of the magazine,” which must be credited with achieving considerable success in “reflecting clearly and continuously the struggles of the working class.” But the magazine still must pursue a stronger political stance, for it “has given altogether too little attention to the struggle against Fascism. As regards social-fascism, By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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the new masses has put up a disgracefully poor fight.” And its literary treatment of the labor movement and the workers’ struggle “suffer[s] from schematism and abstractness in which the concrete content of this struggle is lost.”41 In other words, Jasieński and the IURW believed that New Masses ought to feature literary and visual works that deployed realism to advance the fight against capitalists and their control of an unfair socioeconomic structure—to which “fascism” referred in this context—and to advocate for the workers in an ideologically unambiguous way.

Speaking on behalf of the IURW, Jasieński further

elaborated on the kind of visual arts that the union believed should be featured more prominently on the pages of New Masses, citing examples from 1931: “Very often, in the drawings published in the magazine, we find revolutionary content sacrificed for esthetic innovations and experiments in form (Gropper’s cover for the April number; Soglow’s drawings for the May and June numbers; the September cover, etc.) together with a fetishistic approach to capitalist technique (Lozowick) and its underestimation of the consciousness and militancy of the revolutionary movement with corresponding overestimation of the might of American capitalism.”42 Similar to its criticism of “schematic” and “abstract” literary work, the IURW favored more realistic imagery. However, the criticized artists, Louis Lozowick (1892– 1973) in particular (one of the magazine’s founders and editorial staff, and Ishigaki’s colleague and friend), had maintained that abstract paintings, rendered in 36 Louis Lozowick, Tanks #1 (The Tank), in New Masses, May 1929, 2. Lithograph.

hard lines and geometric shapes, represented a radical pictorial innovation that corresponded to radical politics—in other words, their “revolutionary art,” a kind of homage to Russian constructivists active in the 1910s and ’20s (figure 36).43 One can regard Ishigaki’s Whipping and his semiabstract pictorial language as the artist’s corresponding effort in this camp of American leftist art. Responding to the IURW resolution and the new direction of New Masses, however, in the 1930s both Ishigaki and Lozowick created more representational imagery that offered clearly topical and socially engaged commentary, evident in Lozowick’s much-reproduced Lynching (Lynch Law) (1936) (figure 37) and Ishigaki’s The Bonus March, The Noose (Lynching) (1931), and Ku Klux Klan (South U.S.A.)—all of which tackled racism and racially motivated violence, as discussed later in this chapter.44

In Jasieński’s criticism of New Masses, he also pointed out that the magazine had

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cultural organizations in America” in order to fulfill its role as the “central organ of the IURW in the U.S.A.”45 His criticism was not entirely accurate, for the JRC was founded in part by a group of New Masses staff members in October 1929. As its draft manifesto declared, its nationwide organizations (a total of thirteen clubs in 1932) were to promote the “development of the revolutionary culture of the working class” and encourage proletarian artists to produce the kind of art that would contribute to the common struggle against capitalist oppression and exploitation, fascism and imperialist aggression, and “the influence of middle-class ideas in the work of revolutionary writers and artists.”46 Ishigaki, Lozowick, and Gropper, another artist named in the IURW letter, were all founding and active JRC members and prolific contributors to New Masses.

Similar to the editorial debates at New Masses, the JRC artists had also grappled

since the inception of the club with the question of what the appropriate form and content of a revolutionary art ought to be.47 While the club artists were largely in agreement in terms of their pictorial content, which highlighted socioeconomic issues (their imagery unequivocally proclaimed their anticapitalist protest), their formal expressions varied. This is best exemplified by An American Landscape, a collaborative illustration by the club artists that was published in the April 1930 issue of New Masses. Its subject matter is clearly a protest against the oppressive establishment, embodied in a large, menacing policeman on horseback clubbing men on the street, with the grim Capitol building looking on in ominous silence. But the picture is a somewhat odd mixture of abstraction and realism that also corresponds to the contributing artists’ divergent pictorial styles and choices. In part to respond to the IURW’s push for more explicitly

37 Louis Lozowick, Lynching (Lynch Law), 1936. Lithograph on paper, 10.4 × 7.4 in.

proletarian, and realistic, literary and visual work, the JRC held its first national conference in May 1932, where it produced resolutions that included a pledge to “make the club a functioning center of proletarian culture, to clarify and elaborate the point of view of proletarian as opposed to bourgeois culture; to extend the influence of the club and the revolutionary working class movement.”48 Until the club’s dissolution in 1936, the JRC artists indeed devoted much attention to revolutionary causes and showcased its artists’ pictorial protests in its annual exhibitions, which had explicitly worded titles, such as Hunger, Fascism, War in 1932 (in which Hideo Noda showed five works, but Ishigaki showed only one) and The Social Viewpoint in Art in 1933.49

Considered in this ideological context, Ishigaki’s Bonus

March could be regarded as one in his series of pictorial contributions to this collective effort, both as a member of the JRC and as an engaged New Masses contributor. Indeed, The Bonus March and American Cossacks (shown in a small solo exhibition at the JRC in 1932), along with later works such as Revolt on the Island of Cuba, Uprising, and Crash on the Street (or Demo, 1934), all illustrate Ishigaki’s intensifying visual rhetoric, which directs By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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critical attention toward oppressive regimes’ violent tactics to suppress the underclass’s resistance and uprising. Engaging in the Race Discourse by Proxy of His Black Heroes The deployment of African American figures as his protagonists in The Bonus March and other images appears to have been driven as well by Ishigaki’s engagement in the discourses on race. As Ishigaki did not customarily explain the intentions behind his artistic production, it is not possible to say why he did not take a more autobiographical approach by painting people of Asian descent to address issues concerning race and class. But he was apparently aware of the ramifications of the racist and exclusionary policies promulgated by the U.S. government as he strove to establish his reputation as an American artist. For instance, when he was dismissed from the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration in July 1937, along with many other prominent emigrant artists, because they were legally “aliens,” his statement was wistful: “I have lived in this country for thirty years, but because Orientals cannot become citizens, they have taken our only means of livelihood from us. Though we live like other Americans—have been educated here, pay taxes, and have the same stomachs as American citizens—we are not allowed to become naturalized. You can see how unfair the whole thing is.”50 His comment reveals a deep dissatisfaction with the inequality that he and fellow immigrants had to endure despite his assimilationist claim—of having become American in almost every aspect of life. It also points to the artist’s grappling with issues of race as an émigré who felt relegated to the space of minority and the disadvantaged, not dissimilar to the predicament that African Americans faced.

More significant, by valorizing a heroic black figure, the painting served to articu-

late Ishigaki’s pictorial intervention in broader discourses concerning race in America and the prevailing visual representations of African Americans. For his choice to foreground a black veteran called attention to a contingent of African American soldiers who served in segregated regiments in World War I but marched alongside, and lived among, white veterans during the march—an important aspect of the march that many historians subsequently sidestepped or overlooked.51 Historically, few artists (African American or otherwise) portrayed World War I black veterans in their paintings, according to art historian Jacqueline Francis. Even the rare example that Francis cites, Negro Soldiers (1934), a mural by artists Malvin Gray Johnson and Earle W. Richardson depicting bands of “doughboys” bravely fighting for their country, shows no visible facial features of the soldiers, who form a united but anonymous front.52 And in visual works that deal with the march, the focus remains on white veterans. For example, in the illustration on the dust jacket of John Henry Bartlett’s 1937 book The Bonus March and the New Deal, a white veteran in a tattered uniform walks alone toward the Capitol building with his arms outstretched while braving rocks hurled at him. While some photographic reportage included black veterans, drawings or paintings about the Bonus Army did not feature African Americans proudly marching arm-in-arm with their white comrades.53 60

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In Ishigaki’s Bonus March, on the other hand, the black veteran has a larger-

than-life presence among the demonstrators. In effect, Ishigaki unapologetically foregrounds a powerful African American who not only marches side-by-side with his white compatriots, but also confidently spearheads the charge (at least pictorially speaking) to champion and fight for his and his fellow soldiers’ rights. The pictorial strategy of glorifying a black veteran, even when the contemporary narratives minimized or neglected African American soldiers’ sacrifice in World War I, makes The Bonus March an unusual work among those by artists who were producing socially and racially conscious imagery.

Progressive artists by and large portrayed African Americans as victims of social

injustice during this period, a prevailing representational choice that, perhaps inadvertently, represented blacks as in need of rescue by others (whites). Artists used the subject matter of lynching in their artwork to protest against racist vigilantism, to argue for tougher antilynching legislation, and to raise public awareness of racial inequality in American society. However, such imagery tended to focus on the zealous mobs and the gruesome violence that was inflicted on black victims, instead of giving these victims any agency to fight back, at least in pictorial terms. In Lynching (Lynch Law), Lozowick’s contribution to the antilynching cause, he pushes the noosed victim’s contorted face up against the picture plane, thus implicating the viewer in the ambiguous and uneasy position of witness/conspirator. But his chiaroscuro highlights the suffering man without giving him any (pictorial) agency to speak, or resist and fight, for himself. The figure about to be devoured by the flames set by a masked mob in George Bellows’s lithograph The Law Is Too Slow (1923), the charred and mangled body that hangs lifelessly in Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture Death (1934), and the castrated man bound to a broken column and left to die in Harry Sternberg’s lithograph Southern Holiday (1935) are just a few more examples among many that portray lynched African Americans as casualties of racism and barbarism.54

New Masses offered a slightly larger variety of pictorial representations of African

Americans in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There was indeed imagery of black victims, such as the agonized face of a noosed man by Jacob Burck on the magazine’s June 1931 cover and Phil Bard’s illustration in the August 1931 issue, By the Way Sheriff, What Did That Nigger Do?, which shows a black man dangling from a tree—the same subject as in Mitchell Siperin’s Southern Holiday, which appeared in the April 1930 issue. But William Siegel’s two covers for New Masses—for the November 1929 and July 1930 issues—both portray African American faces in a solemn and dignified manner that differs from the other imagery of terrorized black bodies and faces. William Gropper also offered some representations of empowered African Americans in New Masses, such as Invading Grafters’ Paradise, in the February 1932 issue, which depicts a large black protester defiantly walking toward the Capitol building while politicians (or bankers) and a policeman scamper and raise their arms in surrender (figure 38). Gropper’s image is one of the few examples, along with Ishigaki’s Bonus March, that foreground and feature a black man dominant in both size and action in a pictorial narrative (Lozowick’s Strike Scene from 1934 also shows a defiant black man gripping By Proxy of His Black Heroes

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a policeman’s baton-wielding wrist, but the figures occupy an equal amount of space in the composition). There appears to be a kind of affinity between these figures, created by like-minded friends and colleagues using art as a weapon against inequality and prejudice.

To be sure, Ishigaki also produced imagery that similarly

portrayed African Americans as helpless victims, such as in The Noose (Lynching) and Klu Klux Klan (South U.S.A.) (figure 39). The former depicts a mob about to hang a bound black man in the dark of the night. The vast darkness that surrounds the lynchers and Ishigaki’s choice to put the viewer at a (safe) distance render the picture a somewhat detached scene. While Klu Klux Klan places the viewer right in the middle of a man’s fight against hooded Klansmen, the black man (bound and presumably about to be lynched) is depicted in a passive, bowed pose. Reviewing a JRC show in 1936 in which the painting was included, Margaret Duroc of Art Front praised Ishigaki’s commitment to portraying progressive causes—“Of all the painters Ishigaki alone has indicated that the workers are ready to fight”—and wrote that his 38 William Gropper, Invading Grafters’ Paradise, in New Masses, February 1932, 15.

painting is a “rhythmical and dynamic composition of the white worker fighting a Ku-Kluxer in order to free a magnificent Negro.” But Duroc also criticized Ishigaki’s representation of the black figure, for it “places too great an accent on the bowed head, to the detriment of the dynamic intention of the painting, and, as meaning, it falsely suggests that the Negro relies upon the white worker alone for his freedom.”55

When a reproduction of South U.S.A. later appeared in the Daily Worker in March

1936 to promote Ishigaki’s first one-person show at the ACA Gallery, it was strategically placed above writer Dorothy Calhoun’s report on her visit with two mothers of the “Scottsboro Boys,” the nine African American teenagers unjustly convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly assaulting two white women on a Southern Railroad freight train in Tennessee in 1931. Calhoun wrote that Mrs. Violet Montgomery, mother of Olen Montgomery, and Mrs. Josephine Powell, mother of Ozie Powell, both sang the praises of the good work that the International Labor Defense, the CPUSA’s legal arm, had done for their sons. As the Boys were still struggling for their freedom after five years of legal battles, Ishigaki’s figure on the left side of the foreground, who appears to be defending the bound man, seems to have offered the newspaper’s editor a somewhat hopeful depiction and projection of the Boys’ fate.56

With the figure’s defiant pose and leading role in the earlier Bonus March, however,

Ishigaki presented a different pictorial narrative that showed an African American man as an unwavering pillar—pictorially and symbolically—of an American society in turmoil. The viewer is given not only a clear view of and direct access to the hero, but also an implied spatial alliance with him and the marchers, as the towering figure stands right up to the picture plane (near the viewer), and the “enemies” (law enforcement and government) are confined to the corner in the background. As such, the image 62

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39  Eitarō Ishigaki, Ku Klux Klan (South U.S.A.), 1936. Oil on canvas, 30.2 × 36.1 in.

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serves as Ishigaki’s critical means to highlight and honor African American veterans’ sacrifice in World War I and their vital presence in the Bonus Army. At the same time, the exaltation of a black hero functioned to subvert the horrific racist photographs that had been circulating among the public.57

Furthermore, Ishigaki’s pictorial intervention corresponded and contributed to

the efforts of a vocal contingent in the discourses on race that pushed for unequivocal recognition of African Americans’ participation in defense of their civil rights, and the complete abolishment of any remnants of Jim Crow. For example, in addition to news reports, New Masses devoted a number of articles and editorials to supporting the marchers, including “The Siege of the Capital,” in which the author, Harry Raymond, lists as one of the ex-servicemen’s demands to the U.S. government that there be no “jimcrowing or discrimination against Negro veterans.” He also points out that while two-thirds of the Chicago delegation was white, they “smashed down the jimcrow barriers” and elected Joe Gardner, Communist candidate for the Illinois General Assembly and an African American, to be their commander.58 Roy Wilkins, a writer for W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and later the head of the NAACP, visited the marchers’ camps in 1932 and enthusiastically declared, “there was one absentee, James Crow.” He observed, “There I found black toes and white toes sticking out side by side from a ramshackle town of pup tents, packing crates, and tar-paper shacks. Black men and white men, veterans of the segregated army that had fought in World War I, lined up equally, perspired in sick bays side by side. For years the U.S. Army had argued that General Jim Crow was its proper commander, but the Bonus Marchers gave lie to the notion that black and white soldiers—ex-soldiers in their case, couldn’t live together.”59 The description of “toe-to-toe” camaraderie and black-and-white alliance is reminiscent of Ishigaki’s depiction of the interlocking torsos in The Bonus March. While the desegregated united front that Wilkins observed continued to provoke criticism from various sectors in society that had yet come to terms with a post-Reconstruction America, the visual and textual support for racial equality and civil rights that Ishigaki and his allies put forth was emphatic and determined.

From the mid-1930s onward, Ishigaki continued to tackle issues of racism and

socioeconomic inequality by pictorially empowering the disenfranchised in his increasingly complex and ambitious works. Elaborating on the layered composition and the motif of a shirtless and muscular male figure, Ishigaki composed two large-scale studies in 1934 for a mural consisting of two groups of bare-chested or naked men (figures 40 and 41). In one, Ishigaki presents four men, two of them on horseback, carrying rifles and what appears to be a railroad or coal-mining pick. One of them extending his arm in a call to action, the men look ready for battle. In the other image, a man rises from a band of naked slaves to confront a menacing mustached horseman. The charging horse and the flying whip recall those in Whipping, but here they are rendered in a realistic manner, with broad brushstrokes of shading defining the incredible musculature of the men (similar to that of the Bonus March figure) and the horses in both drawings. While most of the slaves are bound, the presentation of varying poses—as if they 64

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40 Eitarō Ishigaki, Harlem Courthouse mural study (1), ca. 1935–37. Charcoal on paper, 91.7 × 108.1 in. 41 Eitarō Ishigaki, Harlem Courthouse mural study (2), ca. 1935–37. Charcoal on paper, 91.7 × 108.2 in.

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were physical manifestations of stages of uprising and defiance—creates a rhythmic crescendo toward the upper-left corner, where the freed man stands up and fights back. Considering that the horseman with a whip is the only clothed figure, the studies reiterate and crystallize the pictorial strategy that Ishigaki began developing in The Bonus March: the nakedness of the bodies serves as a signifier of strength, class (laborers and slaves), and alliance among the oppressed minorities, racially and economically speaking.

Ishigaki’s efforts in creating images of cour-

age and resistance against inequality did not receive universal approval, especially when the subject matter concerned race. In 1936, Ishigaki began a commission by the FAP to create sixby-ten-foot murals for the Harlem Courthouse at 170 East 121st Street in New York. In Ishigaki’s mural, Emancipation of Negro Slaves, African American figures feature prominently in a composition that centers around a large, solemn Lincoln, an armed John Brown, an older Frederick Douglass, with his distinctive 42 Unidentified photographer, Eitaro Ishigaki, ca. 1940. The date would be ca. 1936–38, as the completed murals were unveiled in March 1938. The Archives lists the photograph with an “unidentified photographer,” but similar pictures of Ishigaki working on the murals are in the Ralph Gutieri papers, ca. 1930–40.

mane of white hair and beard, and Nathaniel “Nat” Turner, a slave who lead a slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831.60 The figures, particularly the freed slave and the farmworker in the foreground, appear as dignified and hardworking people, not cowering victims of violence. However, the critics focused on Ishigaki’s representation of Abraham Lincoln with “Negroid features,” his lips and nose too “broad” for the critics’ liking (figure 42), as well as on his representation of George Washington in another mural, The Spirit of 1776, with a serious face—“too cruel, not sufficiently benevolent.” After a trial unveiling on March 30, 1938, a firestorm of public outrage broke out that resulted in the eventual removal of his original murals.61

In a rare extended interview with Louise Mitchell of Daily Worker only a few days

after the controversy began, Ishigaki confronted the criticism head-on. He was dumbfounded that his murals had “raised so much fire,” for they had already been seen and even reproduced in newspapers before the unveiling. Addressing the complaint that his Washington looked too “serious,” Ishigaki retorted with a political swipe: “Of course, I made him serious-looking, not like the politician who wears a sugar-coated smile for babies and old ladies. He was President of the United States in very perilous times.” As for Lincoln’s supposed “Negroid” features, Ishigaki’s refutation was unequivocal: “People who are now attacking the figure of Lincoln because they think it looks Negroid are also attacking the Negro people. Otherwise, they could not make these 66

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objections. If the color of the skin is painted dark, that is because the general tone of the mural is somber. There was no willful distortion of fact on my part. These objections only reflect the appalling prejudices of certain persons.”62 It was certainly a stretch to say that attacking his Lincoln figure was the same as attacking African Americans. But Ishigaki understood that racial biases played a crucial role in critics’ outcry and also recognized the subtext of the objections: “I can characterize it in no other way than as another slander against the WPA by opponents of the present administration. They slander the murals also because a Japanese artist painted these scenes of early American history. How can an alien understand the American struggle? they ask.”63 In other words, Ishigaki saw a two-pronged attack: under the guise of disagreement over the artist’s representational choices, the protest was fueled both by conservative critics’ fundamental disapproval of President Roosevelt’s New Deal and economic policies, and by xenophobes who sought to maintain the myth of “racial purity” concerning immigration and even the production of American culture. Ishigaki’s alien status was indeed mentioned in the newspaper reports, as a way for the critics to bolster and legitimize their objection that a foreigner should not have been allowed to represent American presidents and history. In the same interview, in bringing up his and other aliens’ dismissal from the WPA in 1937 and calling it “unfair,” Ishigaki in effect made a link between the plights of immigrants, African Americans, and the disenfranchised.

By proxy of his black heroes, Ishigaki not only formed a sociopolitical coalition

with African Americans but also thrust himself and, by extension, the viewer into the heart of the battles for the democratic rights for all Americans, regardless of racial or national origins. As such, The Bonus March illuminates a kind of “transracial” positioning that Ishigaki constructed in his visual rhetoric and casts a different light on a contentious historical event, with underlying ideological and racial struggles, as critically perceived and represented by an immigrant.

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We Are Scottsboro Boys Hideo Noda’s Visual Rhetoric of Transracial Solidarity

3

It was April 9 when eight of us—all but Roy Wright—were stood up before Judge Hawkins for sentencing. He asked us if we had anything to say before he gave sentence. I said:

“Yes, I have something to say. I’m not guilty of this charge.”



He said, “The jury has found you guilty and it is up to me to pass sentence. I set the date for your

execution July 10, 1931, at Kilby Prison. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”

The people in the court cheered and clapped after the judge gave out with that. I didn’t like it,

people feeling good because I was going to die, and I got ruffed.

I motioned to Solicitor Bailey with my finger.



He came over. I asked him if he knew when I was going to die.



He mentioned the date, like the judge gave it, and I said, “You’re wrong. I’m going to die when

you and those girls die for lying about me.”

He asked me how I knew and I said that that was how I felt.



I looked around. That courtroom was one big smiling white face.1

These are the words of Haywood Patterson describing the moment when he received the first of three death sentences on April 9, 1931. Patterson was one of the nine African American teenagers accused of assaulting two white women on a Southern Railway freight train that left Chattanooga, Tennessee, on March 25 of that year. The eighteenyear-old Patterson, along with his companions Eugene Williams and Andy and Leroy “Roy” Wright, got into a scuffle with several white passengers. The four teens and five other black passengers who were not involved in the fight (Charles Weems, Clarence Norris, Ozzie Powell, Olen Montgomery, and Willie Roberson) were dragged off the train in Paint Rock, Alabama. Two young white women on the same train, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, later accused the nine young men of gang rape. The serious charges, based on the young women’s blatant lies, resulted in the young men’s arrest for assault and trial in Scottsboro, Alabama. On April 6, 1931, one week after an allwhite grand jury indicted all nine of rape, the first trials began. Three days later, the presiding judge, A. E. Hawkins, handed down eight convictions and death sentences.

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43 ACME News, “Scottsboro Boys,” 1931.

A mistrial was declared for Roy Wright, the youngest of the nine at age twelve or thirteen at the time, due to some jurors’ resistance to the prosecution’s request to sentence him to death.2

The courtroom scene in Patterson’s biography was only the beginning of a decades-

long legal nightmare for the so-called Scottsboro Boys. Between April 1931 and April 19, 2013, when Alabama Governor Robert Bentley pardoned and posthumously exonerated all nine Boys, Patterson and his compatriots faced continuous death threats from lynch mobs and multiple death sentences, only to be reprieved in the nick of time in some cases. Patterson, for example, was condemned to death three times, convicted of rape in the fourth trial, received a seventy-five-year sentence, and, after escaping from prison but being recaptured after a bar fight that resulted in a man’s death, was serving a sentence for manslaughter when he died in 1952. While Patterson’s defiant prediction in 1931 of outliving the prosecutor and the accusers did not come true, his observation that the courtroom was essentially one “big smiling white face” was chillingly accurate and descriptive of the racism that confronted him and the Boys.3 The news of the arrests incited such unbridled expressions of racial hatred that sheriffs in Scottsboro, the county seat of Jackson County, Alabama, had to ask for additional troops when a lynch mob swelled to three hundred outside the jail that housed the nine Boys on March 25, 1931.4 As they were moved from jail to prison, armed guards were present to prevent local vigilantes from assassinating the young men, as the widely circulated ACME news photo shows (figure 43). The national edition of the Chicago 70

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Defender, for example, used the picture to accompany its aptly titled report “Victims of Southern Race Prejudice” (May 2, 1931), to illustrate the heightened risks that the accused were facing.

The Scottsboro Boys captured the nation’s attention from the day they were taken

off the train, due in large part to the continuous coverage of newspapers around the country. For instance, the New York Times started publishing stories related to the case almost immediately after the alleged incident took place. The newspaper’s reports, reprinted in other, smaller papers, grew more extensive in the subsequent years, especially after a New Yorker, Samuel Leibowitz (1893–1978), was retained by the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA), to represent the Boys in January 1933. Leibowitz, a Romanian Jew whose family immigrated to the United States in 1897, had established himself as a highly reputable defense lawyer in New York, and he went on to become a New York State Supreme Court justice in 1962. While he was not known for political activism, he was compelled by his belief in the Boys’ innocence, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed their convictions in Powell vs. Alabama in November 1932, and he agreed to serve as a co-counsel with Joseph R. Brodsky, chief attorney of the ILD. Leibowitz thus began his own long public battle against racism and anti-Semitism (both lawyers received persistent death threats) alongside the Boys, with whom his name would become intimately associated.5

Indeed, the Scottsboro case was fraught with racism-fueled injustice from the start,

and it ripped open afresh the national wounds that had barely begun to heal since the Civil War ended. The uncorroborated accusations of two white female passengers allowed the zealous prosecutors, aided by a biased legal apparatus that excluded African Americans from serving as jurors, to seek the ultimate punishment of these black youths for a crime that they did not commit. The trials snowballed into sustained and contentious judiciary battles on racial and ideological fronts. In addition to the “South vs. North” rematch that played out in the Scottsboro case, the defense of the Boys by the ILD/CPUSA (before the NAACP got involved) also exposed tensions and conflict within the African American community as intellectuals and leaders grappled with the involvement of American communists in the social justice/antiracism fight. For instance, in a searing analysis entitled “The Negro and Communism” in the Crisis (September 1931), W. E. B. Du Bois acknowledged the “appeal of the Communists” to some twelve million impoverished and disenfranchised African Americans, as they sought allies in protecting their freedom and their rights to vote, prosper, and live with dignity. But he argued that the ILD/CPUSA took on the Scottsboro case to use the Boys as pawns in their propagandist scheme: “to make this case a center of agitation to expose the helpless condition of Negroes, and to prove that anything less than the radical Communist program could not emancipate them.” Accusing the Communist leadership in the United States of being “neither wise nor intelligent,” Du Bois believed that the “honesty, earnestness and intelligence of the N.A.A.C.P. during twenty years of desperate struggle proved this organization under present circumstances to be the only one, and its methods the only methods available, to defend these boys.” But American communists were too We Are Scottsboro Boys

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narrow-minded and shortsighted to recognize the NAACP and form alliances between “capitalists and laborers North and South, black and white, in every endeavor to win freedom for victims threatened with judicial murder.”6

The Scottsboro convictions provoked a global outcry for justice as well. Support

for the condemned teenagers came in from Germany, Cuba, and England, where the writer H. G. Wells, along with thirty-three members of Parliament and other prominent Englishmen, signed a statement deploring the “inhuman” death sentence and urging a “retrial or appeal.”7 Throughout the United States, various forms of protest and support took place in the aftermath of the Boys’ first trials. For instance, on June 29, 1931, three thousand African Americans gathered in Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City to voice their collective disgust at and objection to the Boys’ execution, scheduled for July 10. It was one of three simultaneous meetings in the area. A day earlier, a racially mixed crowd of about fifteen hundred, organized by the ILD and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, walked the streets of Harlem to protest against the death sentence.8 The novelist Theodore Dreiser put together Mr. President: Free the Scottsboro Boys!, a booklet featuring pleas from the Boys’ mothers, statements to President Roosevelt, the history and court records of the trials, and declarations of support from international figures and organizations. Dreiser asserted in his preface that any citizen “whose sense of justice has not been dulled” would know that the Boys were innocent after reading the case records—a fact that was accepted by “millions” of people around the world. He urged the public to act with “the only weapons they have—through organization, solidarity, unity, mass pressure.” The booklet came on the heels of a failed attempt by five of the Boys’ mothers and a delegation of thirty prominent members of various organizations to meet with the president on Mother’s Day, May 13, 1934, to seek an executive intervention in the case. The publication was to sustain a passionate call for mass demonstration to pressure the government to release the Boys.

Many writers and artists participated in the rallies for the Boys. The case inspired

them to create textual and visual works that simultaneously showed their support of the wrongfully accused and expressed their anger toward injustice.9 Protest work, as many artists proudly admitted, was what they aimed to disseminate in order to educate the public and help it recognize the depth of racism and inequality in this country. For instance, in planning his collaboration with artist Prentiss Taylor, which resulted in the booklet Scottsboro Limited, the poet Langston Hughes was frank in describing his motivation: “The interest which such a booklet might help to arouse in the case would, I suppose, outweigh under any circumstances the financial returns; and that, along with the artistic reason, would be why I would especially like to do the booklet.”10 Published in 1932, Scottsboro Limited contains four poems and one play by Hughes, and a lithograph by Taylor accompanies each poem (figure 44). In the poems and the play, religious evocation is integral to Hughes’s textual protest against injustice. The poem “Christ in Alabama,” for example, opens with the line “Christ is a Nigger, Beaten and black—O, bare your back” and closes with “Nigger Christ / On the cross of the South.”11 Accompanying the poem is Taylor’s stylized treatment of a Christ on 72

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the Cross with the Virgin Mary scene, in which an elongated black figure extends his arms as if he were held up by the invisible cross (two blank strips cut across Taylor’s composition), while a seated woman mourns on one side and cotton blooms on the other. This skyward gesture, with its multivalent references to the Crucifixion, as the figure seeks divine intervention or dignified surrender, recurs throughout Taylor’s illustrations, as seen in those for “8 Black Boys” and “Scottsboro Limited.” The latter, which accompanies Hughes’s play, is a masterful blend of symbolism. The platform onto which the Boys crowd, for example, can be seen as a rail cart (referring to the train) or a raised stage that displays people who are about to be lynched in public. The towering pole behind the figures offers similarly ambiguous connotations, for the wires may suggest electricity related to telephone or train operations, but, as they drop down and link with the figures, they look like strings in a puppeteer’s hand that controls and determines the innocent Boys’ fate.

Before the publication of Scottsboro Limited in

1932, Hughes’s play had appeared in the November 1931 issue of New Masses. Driven by the belief in art as a “weapon” to combat economic and social injustice, New Masses featured many visual works alongside its textual reports and commentaries on the Scottsboro case.12 For example, the magazine’s June 1931 cover featured artist Jacob Burck’s drawing of a lynched figure that, pushed up against the picture plane, demands the viewer’s full attention (figure 45). Using dark, broad lines that occupy the foreground and form a stark contrast with the white background, Burck conveys the horror and agony of the man near the moment of his demise. Without any text to link his drawing specifically to the Scottsboro Boys, Burck’s confrontational image admonishes the viewer to think about all the barbaric lynching already taking place in this country. Working in conjunction with the reports of the trials inside the magazine, it serves as a visual reminder of the horrific execution that the Boys would face in a month. In the same issue is another illustration, Bourgeois Virtue in Scottsboro, by Hugo Gellert, a regular contribu-

44 Prentiss Taylor, Scottsboro Limited, 1931. Lithograph, 13 × 9 in.

tor to New Masses (figure 46). In contrast to Burck’s disembodied figure, Gellert’s nine full-length figures are placed in a bleak room with a white background. Dangling from the ceiling are coils of wire that lead to what appear to be electrocution caps on the figures’ heads (the chair itself is not shown). Gellert likely based the figures on the ACME photo, with some modification of their placement. The figures’ clothes look similar to those in the photograph—note, for example, Clarence Norris’s rolled-up sleeve on the far left and Haywood Patterson’s sweater on the far right. Gellert uses a We Are Scottsboro Boys

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45 Jacob Burck, cover, New Masses, June 1931. 46 Hugo Gellert, Bourgeois Virtue in Scottsboro. From New Masses, June 1931, 7. Drawing.

variety of shading and continuous lines to build up the figures so they look solid and voluminous, and depicts them in stances and with expressions that render them stoic and dignified even in the face of such terror. The caption—describing a newspaper’s insinuation that the locals would prefer a fast-tracked execution of the Boys—drives home the blatant racism and injustice that confronted the accused.13

In addition to another work by Gellert, The Scottsboro Legal Lynching—The Face of

the NAACP, with the Arms of the Bosses (1932), Philip Guston created a multipanel fresco mural based on the accounts of the trials (also 1932); George Biddle offered a repulsive visualization of racism in Alabama Code: “Our Girls Don’t Sleep with Niggers” (1933); and Aaron Douglas presented solemn but exquisitely crafted portraits of two of the Boys, Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson, in Scottsboro Boys (ca. 1935).14 Together with the harrowing antilynching imagery created by Ishigaki, Sternberg, Lozowick, and other artists discussed in the previous chapter, these works represent visual artists’ collective cry against the racism and injustice they witnessed in the Scottsboro case and elsewhere in the tumultuous 1930s.

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Scottsboro Boys, 1933 It was in this milieu that Hideo Benjamin Noda (1908–1939), a California-born artist, painted Scottsboro Boys in 1933, when he was twenty-four or twenty-five years old (figure 47). His first overtly topical work, it has remained in relative obscurity.15 A man stands at the painting’s left margin, the text on his sweater identifying him as Haywood Patterson. Patterson’s semitranslucent legs look as if they are either emerging or disappearing—an ambiguous pictorial choice that contributes to a sense of his uncertain fate. Behind Patterson are crudely outlined figures and a barely visible train on an elevated track that cuts across an urban environment composed of brick and wooden structures. Rendered in shifting perspective, the grid on the ground nevertheless leads the eye to the distant horizon, where a turquoise strip suggestive of water glimmers. With an ashen overtone covering everything except for a few bright spots, Noda conjures a haunting and alienating cityscape whose residents appear indifferent to Patterson’s plight. Pushed to the limits of the painting’s frame and picture plane, Patterson’s posture and expression communicate a combination of resentment, defiance, and forlornness.

Painted in the depth of the trials, Scottsboro Boys appears to be a pictorialization, in

the tradition of social realism, of Noda’s sympathetic concern for the disenfranchised. But Noda chose a more subdued, understated approach to the subject matter than the visceral visual rhetoric of Burck’s or Sternberg’s imagery. The ghostly figures and the elevated train seem to glide through the drab town or city in silence. The absence of any human presence inside the buildings’ windows, which look like holes, reinforces the stillness of the scene. Instead of dominating the composition, as seen in other Scottsboro-related artwork, Noda’s Patterson figure stands on the edge, with a small part of his body cropped off by the frame. His marginal existence is further echoed by the two enigmatic forms in the lower-right corner, which appear to be the bodies of two people lying on newspapers in the street. The upside-down “scottboro [sic] boys must not die,” a version of the popular slogan “Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die” that was used in protest literature and mass demonstrations, is written on a piece of paper underneath one of the bodies. The inconspicuous slogan quietly but unequivocally drives home the painting’s message in support of the Boys and, more broadly, victims of social injustice and racial prejudice.16

At approximately eleven by sixteen inches, Scottsboro Boys is intimate in scale com-

pared to murals, the medium in which Noda was arguably most well versed. He had previously assisted the famed Mexican artist Diego Rivera on two projects: the notorious, doomed Rockefeller mural, Man at the Crossroads, earlier in 1933, and The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City in 1931 at California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), where Noda received his art training from 1929 to 1931. Noda identified himself as a painter who specialized in the “fresco medium” and highlighted his “knowledge in the practical field” on his job applications for the Public Works of Art Project and the Treasury Relief Art Project, two of the national public art programs in President Roosevelt’s New Deal.17 In fact, Noda was chosen to design (but did not complete)

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47  Hideo Noda, Scottsboro Boys (Alabama), 1933. Gouache on board, 10.7 × 16.1 in.

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the mural for a long wall in the administration building at Ellis Island, according to his colleague Edward Laning (1906–1981), for whom Noda served as a plasterer for Laning’s mural at the Hudson Guild on West 27th Street in New York in 1933.18 The use of watercolor and gouache with lighter brushwork in Scottsboro Boys, as opposed to the more strenuous construction in fresco or oil painting, allows for a faster painting process that, in turn, gives the small painting a stronger sense of immediacy. It suggests that Scottsboro Boys might have been created as a personal work not originally intended for public consumption, as murals are. At the same time, with its topical subject matter of grave importance, the painting served as a work through which Noda engaged in the contemporary discourse on contentious issues. Noda’s departure from the muralist and social realist convention of didactic clarity by incorporating obfuscated pictorial elements throughout the composition, however, makes Scottsboro Boys a curious work that provokes questions about what the artist was trying to achieve in this image.

The visual rhetoric in Scottsboro Boys points, I posit, to Noda’s engagement in

debates about what subject matter and pictorial styles best served American artists’ dual objectives: defining modernity in visual terms and effecting social change through art.19 Situating himself somewhere between proponents of didactic social realism and of formalist abstraction, Noda aimed to create an image that was topical but also conveyed a broader message of universal humanism. As a member of an ethnic minority within a society gripped by racial and socioeconomic strife, Noda deployed painting as a critical means of asserting his cross-racial solidarity with the accused. Registering a commitment to leftist causes, Scottsboro Boys also serves as a young artist’s proclamation of his aspiration to fight for the global disenfranchised and take action beyond the confines of his studio. First, Scottsboro Boys was Noda’s earliest major work to attract critical notice in the New York art scene. Prior to 1933, he had shown two paintings, Easy Winter (1932) and Portrait of Girl (1932), in the Fifty-Fourth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association in 1932, and his San Francisco (1932) was selected for the Art Institute of Chicago’s juried Forty-Fifth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, held from October 27, 1932, to January 7, 1933.20 Scottsboro Boys, originally titled Alabama, was Noda’s submission to Hunger, Fascism, War, the second annual exhibition of the John Reed Club (JRC) artists in 1933 and Noda’s highest-profile group show to date in New York. The JRC, serving as the cultural arm of the CPUSA, organized exhibitions on themes related to “social struggle” to showcase progressive artists’ response to and support of the working class’s fight for better socioeconomic conditions and treatment.21 The organizers took an inclusive approach, showing various media, styles, and forms to encourage artists not only to deploy the creative expressions that they deemed most effective to address the workers’ plight but also to become involved in the “historic class struggle” through art. Among the exhibited works were paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints by both established and young artists, such as Burck, Gropper, Lozowick, Laning, Peggy Bacon, George Biddle, Anton Refregier, José Clemente Orozco, and many others. Ishigaki submitted I Will Not Speak, while Noda, showing Alabama, Demonstration, Morning at Sixth Avenue, Break Up, and Chaotic We Are Scottsboro Boys

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Age, had the most works in the exhibit among the seventy-seven participating artists, a testament to both his ambition and the JRC’s recognition of his artistic promise and contribution.22 Noda’s paintings in the JRC exhibition must have attracted some attention, which, along with his active participation in other group shows in 1933 and 1934, enabled him to enter the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting in late 1934. His submission, Street Scene (1934), was acquired by the museum and even received a special mention in a Brooklyn Daily Eagle review, which called it a work by “a mural painter and real modern, immensely responsive to the daily sorrows and beauties of people in 1935.”23

In his review of Hunger, Fascism, War, artist and JRC member Louis Lozowick

recognized the superior quality of the entries and commended what he saw as a more focused “militant class consciousness seeking an embodiment in form that would impress its message most eloquently, and transmitting an emotional impact that is contagious.”24 His assessment echoed the language used in the exhibition’s introduction: the “message,” as the show’s title spelled out, was that artists should “take the side of the revolutionary working class in its fight against hunger, fascism and war,” and the “emotional impact” on the viewer could be achieved through an artist’s effective use of art forms “to comment, to satirize, to condemn or praise.” Lozowick highlighted Noda and one of his five paintings with a mixed appraisal. While he thought Noda’s and several other artists’ works were “done with a competence and assurance that would give them a prominent place in any gallery,” he opined that Noda might benefit from simplifying his composition for the sake of clarity: “Noda, for example, possesses a highly individual gift and has a fine sensitiveness to color; yet his desire to say much in little space leads him to crowd his pictures with too many figures and details, so that even the clearest ideas (the Scottsboro case) become hard to decipher. His method of using a variety of incidents and several moments of time simultaneously, while a perfectly legitimate and fruitful procedure, if used with great care, only adds to the confusion.”25 Lozowick’s review was not illustrated, but his reference to the Scottsboro case, which was taking place in Alabama, indicates that Alabama was likely the painting now known as Scottsboro Boys. The title change might have taken place during the artist’s lifetime—changing a painting’s title when submitting it to different exhibitions was a common practice. Another possibility is that Scottsboro Boys was given as the new title when the painting traveled from one collection to another—in Noda’s case, from one country and language to another.26

Lozowick’s complaint about Noda’s pictorial choices may have to do with both

the artist-critic’s advocacy at the time—he believed that art should impart revolutionary ideas in an unambiguous way, as seen in his Lynching and many of his New Masses illustrations—and his mandate that an image be clear for proselytization purposes. Indeed, aside from the foregrounded Patterson figure, other sociopolitical references in Noda’s painting are somewhat obscured; it thus fails to meet Lozowick’s demand that artists create imagery whose meaning and message are clear. Lozowick was not alone in voicing his dissatisfaction with the JRC exhibition’s lack of “militancy” in its selection. Fellow artist Bernarda Bryson, who showed three works, also reviewed the 78

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exhibition in mixed terms, pointing out that some artists expressed clearer Marxist and anticapitalist viewpoints, while others’ “first attempts at class-conscious art are crude or uncertain.” The exhibition succeeded, Bryson acknowledged, in showing that more artists were beginning to “identify themselves with the mass war against capitalism.”27

Lozowick’s and Bryson’s critiques notwithstanding, it may be helpful to consider

Scottsboro Boys as Noda’s attempt at participating in the discourses concerning whether realism or abstraction better served artists’ goals of creating the kind of socially engaged art that befitted modern American society. Having been trained in mural techniques and having assisted Rivera on projects, Noda was familiar with mural paintings’ expansive and complex compositions, consisting of a confluence of events, figures, and locations deemed relevant enough to be shown together within the same frame. This may explain, in part, Noda’s combination of “a variety of incidents and several moments of time,” in Lozowick’s words, in a small painting like Scottsboro Boys.28 Noda’s collage-like composition and lose brushwork in watercolor and gouache allow for a layering of motifs that suggests a kind of disjuncture between reality and the nightmare state that the accused might have experienced. Eschewing the didactic clarity that characterized much socially engaged art of the period, Noda seems to have instead drawn inspiration from the surrealists, creating an image with incongruent elements that provoke a sense of bewilderment, or “confusion,” in Lozowick’s word—Noda regarded both Salvador Dalí and Fernand Léger as influential artists of his time.29 While social realist painters in general favored representational depictions of topical subject matter (as in Ishigaki’s Bonus March), Noda deployed simplified but expressive lines to produce a flat, semiabstract, but layered scene that also engages, albeit not fully, with proponents of abstraction as the preferred pictorial language for conveying and defining notions of modernity. It could be argued that Noda was attempting an alternative visual rhetoric, or a solution of sorts to the modernist quandary of how to effectively reconcile formal and sociopolitical concerns.

A closer examination of Noda’s pictorial choices points to the artist’s desire to

expand his message and confront broader issues of injustice beyond, but signified by, the plight of the Scottsboro Boys. Noda seems to have freely incorporated ambiguous and arguably confusing references to different places into the painting. For example, the displaced elevated train track that cuts across the town is not a faithful depiction of Scottsboro, Alabama. The glimpse of blue in the distance might represent the Tennessee River, which runs along the southeast border of Scottsboro, but water could be the backdrop of any of the American towns and cities that Noda himself had lived in, from New York City and Woodstock to San Francisco. And while it may be tempting to read the inclusion of a barbershop as Noda’s nod to the quintessential gathering place in African American communities, there is no evidence to suggest that Noda was referring to a particular shop associated with the Scottsboro case. In other words, the unspecific or unidentifiable setting may signal that the painting, along with its message against injustice, is about more than Scottsboro, Alabama, and more than Patterson.

An even more telling component in Scottsboro Boys is that the man identified as

“Patterson” is in fact not Haywood Patterson—or more precisely, it is more than a We Are Scottsboro Boys

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representation of Patterson. A comparison between Noda’s painting and his probable source of inspiration, the news photograph that also served as the basis for Gellert’s illustration, reveals that Noda’s protagonist is in fact a composite. In pose and expression, the figure bears less resemblance to Patterson (at far right in the photo) than he does to Roy Wright (second from right). They are the only two in the group wearing sweaters, and Noda in his painting clearly replicates Wright’s prominent V-shaped collar and noticeable button. While Wright’s contrapposto elevates his left shoulder, unlike the painted figure’s pose, his turned-in left foot, the cap in his left hand, and his direct gaze at the camera all align with Noda’s image. The artist even takes care to highlight Wright’s hairline and the grooves that converge at the top of his nose. It is unmistakable that Noda’s figure, while not rendered in high realism, appears to be modeled on Wright, as shown in the photograph, instead of Patterson.

This is unlikely to be a simple case of mistaken identity. Granted, newspapers

did not always correctly identify the Boys when they appeared in news photos. The cropped version of the same ACME photo in the aforementioned Chicago Defender report, for example, did not have the nine names, making it difficult for a reader to know who the Boys individually were. But Patterson had the highest profile among the accused teenagers, thanks to his outspokenness, his tacit role as the “leader” of the nine, and the publicity surrounding his trials, especially after Samuel Leibowitz began to represent him in January 1933. The two of them often appeared together in newspaper reports, making Patterson the most well known of the Scottsboro Boys and Leibowitz the most prominent on their defense team.30 It is thus unlikely that Noda could not correctly identify Patterson in the source picture.

It is reasonable to assume, then, that Noda transposed Patterson’s name onto

Wright’s likeness to better serve his pictorial purposes. Aesthetically speaking, Wright has arguably the most dramatic stance, reminiscent of the poses of many classical statues, in which their weight rests on one of their hips while the other side of their bodies is raised for counterbalance. Willie Roberson, the fourth man from the left in the photograph, is the only other figure in contrapposto, but his body forms more of a straight, albeit tilted, line that is less complex and visually interesting than Wright’s. By imprinting Patterson’s name on Wright’s torso, Noda took advantage of Patterson’s representative status in the public consciousness as well. His recognizable name enabled viewers to connect the somewhat obfuscated image to the Scottsboro trials (as Lozowick apparently did). Wright’s posture and unmistakable glare convey anger, if not overt insubordination. By foregrounding Wright’s defiance, and by extension that of the Boys, Noda in effect created out of two figures a composite and ideal protagonist who directly confronts viewers on behalf of the wrongfully accused and forces them to consider the failure of legal and social systems to protect the innocent and the disenfranchised. A Diasporic American Artist There could be another, more personal reason for Noda’s choosing Wright as the protagonist for his Scottsboro narrative. Roy Wright, the youngest of the nine, was only 80

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twelve or thirteen years old when he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in April 1931. The singular and seemingly lonesome figure in Scottsboro Boys is in fact a recurring motif in Noda’s known works during this period, in which he frequently features a solitary child, or a pair of children, usually looking somewhat anxious if not frightened. In some of his earlier canvases, he depicts a young girl, often alone, whose facial expressions and body language indicate her isolation and feeling of uncertainty. In Girl in Car (1932), for example, the blonde girl who dominates the composition has big, bright eyes that flicker with a tinge of nervousness or concern (figure 48). Framed between two windows, one of which shows a boat and the other a train station, the girl looks expectantly toward the side with the incoming train. While the three pictorial elements representing spatial and possibly temporal differences are clearly demarcated in Girl in Car, Noda elaborates on this compositional strategy in his other works by blurring the boundaries of different scenes in the same painting. In Two Children (1934), for instance, he uses gradation and shading to connect the two toddlers at a table in the foreground with a bridge and mountains in the distant background (figure 49). Noda’s pictorial strategy of juxtaposing forms of transportation (such as the train in the lower right corner in Two Children) or merging seemingly disparate places and times imbues his imagery with a dreamlike appearance, highlighting the transient state of the figures, which occupy an indeterminate place. One could argue that the deployment of young protagonists served as Noda’s means of highlighting his pictorial subjects’ isolation and dislocation—anxieties that the incarcerated, like Wright, or a person in diaspora might experience. In the context of Noda’s work of this period, his Scottsboro figure carries a potentially autobiographical significance, for the artist empathized with the teenagers and understood the feelings and conditions of displacement that they might have been experiencing. That is, Noda’s own experience of diaspora, which began at a young age, seemed to have left him with a profound sense of loneliness and longing that underlies many of his images.

A more detailed biographical sketch is necessary here to foreground the personal

history that might have compelled Noda not only to create a painting like Scottsboro Boys, but also to become an artist fully committed to larger ideological causes both in painting and in life. It should be noted, however, that, like other artists in this book, Noda has had a marginal presence in the twentieth-century American art-historical literature, and the existing biographical entries in English (mostly culled from books in Japanese) have some inconsistencies in terms of chronology and facts. The biographical sketch here does not attempt to present a full or detailed account but builds on existing information in Japanese and English publications to offer additional findings (or corrections) based on my extensive archival research.

Unlike the other artists in this book, Noda was born an American citizen, in Santa

Clara, California, on the day after Independence Day in 1908. But in 1911 he was sent to Kumamoto, Japan, to live with his uncle Hatori Takuji, his father’s younger brother, who was adopted by a wealthy family and became a dentist. Noda spent his formative years in Japan and did not return to the United States until after he graduated from middle school in 1926. Living under the roof of his strict uncle in Kumamoto, Japan, and We Are Scottsboro Boys

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48  Hideo Noda, Girl in Car, 1932. Oil on board, 14.75 × 13.95 in.

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49 Hideo Noda, Two Children, 1934. Oil on canvas, 29.9 × 36.1 in.

reportedly never hearing from his parents, Noda formed a close bond with his cousin that is evident in Noda’s paintings of two children keeping each other company, such as Two Children, Easy Winter (1932) and Two Children in a Baby Buggy (1933), according to Seiichirō Kuboshima.31 As his cousin Kanji recalled, it was clear that Noda had a natural talent for art, for he filled the margins of his textbooks with drawings and painted portraits of his sister and cousin. His uncle, however, opposed Noda’s pursuit of art, which led Noda and his cousin to hide in the corners of the house to paint or sculpt—they would take dental plaster from his uncle’s office and carve things out of it.32

After graduating from the Kumamoto middle school, Noda managed to convince

his uncle to let him go back to the United States to study architecture. His uncle relented partly because Noda’s American citizenship would have become invalid by the time he turned eighteen if he did not reside in the United States, and partly because the high school Noda was accepted at, Piedmont High School, a prestigious public school near Oakland, California, with a vibrant and reputable arts program, had accepted many other Japanese students. Kuboshima suggests that Noda was able to get into the school, where he enrolled in 1926, because of his uncle’s connection with Count Yasuya (or Kōsai) Uchida (1865–1936), who served three terms as Japanese foreign minister (1911–12, 1918–23, and 1932–33) and would even be featured on the cover of the September 5, 1932, issue of Time magazine.33 This connection with a powerful figure in Japanese politics—Noda produced a portrait of “Uncle Uchida” in We Are Scottsboro Boys

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1935, though it is unclear if Uchida sat for him (figure 50)—would later become a fateful factor in Noda’s short life.

In any case, Noda’s uncle, as a way to force

young Noda to gain independence, agreed to pay only half of his expenses. Noda excelled at Piedmont, and his art teacher, Lillian Sonnenschein, encouraged him to pursue his artistic aspirations.34 She was also reportedly responsible for bringing Noda back to Piedmont in 1937 to create the large mural School Life, and even paid two hundred dollars for Noda’s trip to Japan after the mural was completed (figure 51). After Noda graduated from high school, he embarked on the full-time pursuit of art making. In 1929, he began taking classes at CSFA—the school’s registrar’s roll shows Noda as a student in the fall semester that year. CSFA was a relatively small school at the time, with only 247 students enrolled. Noda took a variety of courses with many of the leading artists in San Francisco: Gertrude Partington Albright’s sketch class, Otis Oldfield’s painting class, E. Spencer Macky’s life class, and Ralph Stackpole’s sculpture class.35 CSFA was also 50 Hideo Noda, Portrait of Uchida, 1935. Oil on canvas, 16.2 × 12.6 in.

where Noda met his lifelong friend Edward Takeo Terada (1908–1993), a Japanese immigrant who attended the school until 1932 and was one of the twenty-five artists chosen to create frescoes for the interior walls of Coit Tower in 1934.36

Terada recounted in detail in his 1953 essay “Recollections of Noda Hideo” that

their friendship developed on the basis of a “deep, mutual understanding and trust in one another.” In 1929, Terada learned that a new Japanese student from Oakland had won a scholarship and was crossing the Bay to study at CSFA. There were more than ten Japanese students enrolled at the school then, according to Terada, and they all excelled; Terada himself, for example, was on the Anne Bremer scholarship. Along with another Japanese student, Yoshio Inokuma, the young men formed what they jokingly called “a distinguished trio.” Noda and Terada became closer when they moved in together. Their focus on art making had led to their neglecting the responsibilities of serving as “student workers”—houseboys who helped with a family’s house chores in exchange for having a room to sleep in and a ten-cent weekly allowance—and consequently both lost their lodgings. The two young and idealistic artists came to the conclusion that “washing dirty dishes, peeling potatoes or carrots, or doing laundry for other people” just to earn some spare change and a place to stay had been a serious waste of time. Their job, first and foremost, was to make art. So they gathered a grand 84

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51 Hideo Noda, School Life (Piedmont High School mural), 1937. Fresco. Main panel: 107.5 × 45 in. Side panels: 18.5 × 52.5 in.

total of twenty-six dollars and seventy-five cents between the two of them and found a dilapidated but quiet house to rent. As a former photography studio, the house had a skylight, perfect for painting, and they borrowed a bed from a friend to complete their new home. In celebration, the two “danced and embraced, jumping around and howling as if we were Indians.” With a measly budget, they could only live on rice, soy sauce, and wild vegetables that they gathered and pickled. But, “come to think of it, we had never been happier,” Terada reminisced.37

The budding artists embarked on a productive period of creativity, finding ful-

fillment in devoting their time to painting even in the face of destitution. Terada remembered an incident in which he received a cable saying that Noda had been severely injured. Rushing back from Monterey, where he was on a painting trip, Terada found Noda bandaged and laid up in bed. It turned out that Noda had been so immersed in working on a mural that he forgot he was standing on a scaffold; when he stepped back to appreciate his work, he fell from the scaffold and was knocked unconscious. Reportedly, one of the planks broke his fall and saved him from plunging We Are Scottsboro Boys

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to his death. While Noda’s excuse for the accident was that he was too focused on (and enamored of) his own work, food deprivation likely played a role as well.38

During this period Noda also received training in fresco-painting techniques. On

the CSFA faculty, Stackpole and Ray Boynton were instrumental in facilitating the famed muralist Diego Rivera’s visit to San Francisco and his commissions in the city. A group of CSFA faculty and students also had the chance to be involved in Rivera’s projects, such as by posing for him or preparing the walls.39 Noda earned the opportunity to assist Rivera on his murals for the north wall of the gallery at the school in 1931. The charismatic but infamously temperamental Rivera apparently liked and worked well with Noda, because two years later he asked Noda to join him on the mural project for the Great Hall of the seventy-story RCA Building in Rockefeller Center in New York. According to Rivera’s autobiography, Noda was one of the assistants who witnessed the seizure of the incomplete Rockefeller project on May 9, 1933, due to Rivera’s refusal to remove his portrait of Vladimir Lenin in the Man at the Crossroads mural, among other complicating factors.40 A New York Times story on the event also names Noda: “Senor Rivera’s assistants who were with him when he was ousted last night were Ben Shahn, Hideo Noda, a Japanese; Lou Bloc[h], Lucienne Bloch, Sanchez Flores and Arthur Niendorff.”41

Noda had been in New York for two years before reuniting with Rivera and was

going through major changes in his professional and personal life. In the spring of 1931, he quit CSFA to go to New York, at the invitation of the artist Arnold Blanch, who was a visiting painting instructor at CSFA for the 1931–32 academic year and won the San Francisco Art Association’s first Anne Bremer Prize in 1931.42 Doris Lee, who would become Blanch’s second wife, was a fellow student at CSFA in 1930–31, and in 1931 both Lee and Noda moved to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League’s summer school in Woodstock. Among the teachers at the League, in addition to Blanch, were established artists such as John Sloan, George Grosz, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The vibrant artist community offered Noda a new and stimulating environment that enabled him to expand his repertoire in terms of subject matter and technique. While his time in Woodstock was brief, he participated in the exhibitions at the Woodstock Art Gallery and emerged as a young and noteworthy talent (figure 52). In a mixed review of the first Woodstock show, Arnold Wiltz made special mention of Noda’s work: “there is a very fine and very sensitive drawing of a young child’s head by Noda, to which I would call attention.” Wendell Jones, a longtime Woodstock artist, went further in his praise when reviewing the second Woodstock show: “nearby is Hideo Noda’s ‘Early Spring’ with a poetic glamour that is very rare. These have magic.” Another reviewer highlighted Noda’s other painting in the second show: “In ‘Girl In A Train,’ a forceful picture by Hideo Noda, one has a vision of a subway express in Times Square.” And a review of the last art show of the season in 1932 offered the most unreserved approbation: “Hideo Noda’s ‘San Francisco’ is decidedly an outstanding piece of work. . . . Noda is surprisingly himself for so young a painter. There is good craftsmanship in his work and more than a little palatable humor.”43 During the same period, Noda produced numerous landscapes of 86

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52 Hideo Noda, Woodstock Art Gallery, 1932. Pen and watercolor on paper, 10.3 × 11.4 in.

rural scenes in watercolor and gouache that had an overall lighter texture and more layered composition—a pictorial approach that he later deployed to greater effect in Scottsboro Boys.

The most significant personal event that took place in Woodstock was meeting his

future wife. Writing to his best friend, Terada, in the summer of 1931, Noda exclaimed, “I chanced upon a young blond girl in the woods in Woodstock and fell in love. Her name was Ruth. How about that? Surprise!”44 The married couple moved to New York City for Noda to concentrate on pursuing his art career. Ruth became Noda’s muse, for he drew and painted her every day. As they strolled around the city, Ben, or Hideo, as Ruth called him, would be become inspired and sketch Ruth right at a café.45 Their love was “real and precious,” Ruth told Kuboshima in a later interview, even though interracial marriages were still rare and looked upon with suspicion. And she appreciated Noda’s complexity as a man: for someone who was educated in Japan as a child, Noda subscribed to the “very American approach” of having a clear “yes” or “no” position on things. But he rarely showed any sadness or emotion on the outside, “much like a typical Japanese man.”46 What the newlywed Ruth could not anticipate, however, was that Noda’s commitment to ideological causes would take him away from her for an extended period of time, beginning in December 1934, less than five years before Noda’s sudden death. In fact, their prolonged separation prompted Ruth to express her frustration in a 1936 letter to Meyer Schapiro, the famed art historian and Noda’s benefactor of sorts: We Are Scottsboro Boys

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53 Hideo Noda, On the Grass in Mill Valley, 1937. Watercolor and pen, 5.2 × 6.6 in.

You may not know where he is directly, but I am sure you know those who do. Even if he is doing important work, he can get in touch with me. It was different when he was in a foreign country . . . and I knew I had to wait. But there can’t be such danger here, especially if he has seen some people—as recently as a week ago a friend of mine saw him on Broadway. . . . The only way I know of contacting him is through you, but if you can’t reach him, I am going to the Party House and see if they can help me. I don’t think I am acting hastily—two years is a pretty long time to have waited with not a single sign of communication. However I don’t want to do anything wrong. Please let me hear from you.47

Ruth’s letter, written on October 12, 1936, tellingly conveys a wife’s plea, a veiled threat, and exasperation. And her suspicion of her husband’s whereabouts was not unfounded. Noda had indeed been back in the United States for almost three months by the time Ruth wrote the letter. Leaving Japan on the ship Asama Maru on July 10, 1936, and reaching San Francisco on July 23, he had subsequently traveled through Chicago (August 25), reached New York’s Grand Central Station in the early morning of August 30, and arrived at Poughkeepsie in upstate New York on the same day. Noda concluded his September 3 letter to Schapiro in a rather curious and wistful manner: “I am sorry you haven’t seen Ruth so long; I hope she will be fine whether we see each other or not.”48 88

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In a surviving letter that has Noda’s words alongside a small painting, one gets a

rare and intimate glimpse of Noda’s longing for Ruth, as his work took him away from her for an extended period of time. Writing on a day off while he was hiking in Mill Valley sometime in 1937 (presumably working on the Piedmont mural), Noda tells his “sweetheart” (misspelled “sweatheart”) that he was thinking about her wherever he went, and the flowers he picked reminded him of the time they spent in Saugerties (New York) and that “beautiful blue flower of the hill.” The accompanying landscape, showing San Francisco Bay and the newly completed Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, and Noda’s autobiographical figure of a tiny, outstretched man on a rolling hill, has a dreamlike quality, especially with the blended presence of a female profile in the sky (figure 53). Its spontaneous lines and brushstrokes succinctly express Noda’s emotions, reinforced by his own wistful voice: “I’ve loved the air and grass. I streached [sic] and made my self really free and comfortable. It was wonderful and divine except you are not beside me,” Noda laments. “I wanted you beside me very very much.”

The Nodas did reunite, albeit only briefly, when Ruth joined Hideo in Japan in

August 1938. By the time the couple went to Lake Nojiri in Nagano for a vacation in late 1938, though, Noda was losing his eyesight. He was hospitalized in the Tokyo Imperial University Hospital at the end of November. Thinking he could leave the hospital soon and go back to the United States, he let Ruth go back first by boat on December 8. But after an unsuccessful operation to remove a cerebral tumor, Noda died in the early morning of January 12, 1939.49 An International “Spy” for the Communist Party In the same 1936 letter in which Noda thanked Schapiro for sending a forty-fivedollar check to the YMCA where Noda was staying, he included another rather cryptic statement: “I don’t know how to express my glateful-ness [sic] to you and all, since I made such mistakes and mix up your and all other four friends. It is wonderful to hear from you in such a long letter, however I am afraid I’ve deprived your precious time by writing me or arranging all other minor business or account of me.”50 The “mistakes,” “mix-ups,” and “friends” that Noda references likely had to do with both his recent trip to Japan and the “Party House” that Ruth mentions in her letter. They were parts of a crucial (and last) chapter in Noda’s short life that arguably began at around the same time he painted Scottsboro Boys in 1933. In fact, the subject of injustice against the Boys, as well as the three names that Noda rather inconspicuously cited in the painting’s lower-right corner—“S. Gussev,” “Rose Pastor Stokes,” and “Clara Zetkin”—are all indicators of Noda’s ideological commitment to sociopolitical causes that led him not only to paint about his beliefs but also to act on them.

The “Party” in question was the Communist Party, for which Noda was reportedly

engaged in “underground work” in Japan in 1935 and 1936. When he left for Japan in December 1934, Noda claimed that it was a trip to learn more about artistic developments in Japan. While there, he did make contact with like-minded artists; held We Are Scottsboro Boys

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his first one-man exhibition at the Ginza Seijusha Art Gallery in May of 1935; and, at his friend Terada’s invitation, showed two paintings (including Way Home) in the Twenty-Second Nikka Exhibition in September and collaborated on a mural for the Cotton Club in Ginza (destroyed in World War II).51 While his biographies in Japanese mention but somewhat minimize his underground work (which is also absent from the scant biographical entries in English), a few key players in this episode of Noda’s life have verified his involvement.52

Noda joined the CP’s plans for an espionage network in Japan sometime in 1934,

when Schapiro was asked to introduce Noda to Whittaker Chambers, an American writer and editor at the Daily Worker and New Masses from 1926 to 1932 who also worked as a Soviet underground agent operating a spy network in the United States.53 Directives from the Soviet CP specified that someone from the United States needed to set up an operation in Tokyo and called for an “Anglophone Japanese Communist,” preferably with access to “high Japanese circles,” to serve as an assistant. Chambers was led to believe that Noda came from an “aristocratic lineage,” but that might have been a misunderstanding of what Noda said, or a misrepresentation on his part.54 And indeed, Chambers was not completely certain about Noda’s lineage: “[Noda] was also a cousin or nephew of one of the Japanese premiers—Prince Konoye, if I remember rightly.” (He may have been thinking of Noda’s connection to Foreign Minister Uchida.) In any case, Chambers recalled that Noda was an intelligent and “young painter of exceptional promise” and “one of the favorite pupils” of Diego Rivera.55 Noda readily agreed to act as an underground agent, according to Chambers, and became an assistant for John Loomis Sherman, a writer and operative who would head the American Feature Writers Syndicate in Tokyo, a front news agency set up under the Soviet CP’s direction to gather intelligence in Japan. Sherman’s name on his false passport and the business enterprise registration was “Charles F. Chase.” Noda’s alias was “Ned.”56

It was reported that the American Feature Writers Syndicate gathered little informa-

tion of any value during its eight months of operation. When the Russian agent known simply as “Bill,” who was the mastermind behind the establishment of the Japanese spy ring, received information (later shown to be false) that the Tokyo apparatus had been compromised, he ordered the office to shut down in late 1935. Both Sherman and Noda were asked to return to the United States.57 Chambers met with Noda again when the artist made his way back to New York, probably in late 1936 (based on the dates of Noda’s letters to Schapiro, though Chambers thought their meeting took place in 1935). His description of Noda and their interaction is heartbreaking. Chambers admitted that he felt “extremely sorry” for Noda. “The talented young Japanese seemed to me to be destroying his great gifts,” Chambers lamented. He also thought that Noda was already “showing signs of disillusionment as a result of his experience in Japan.” While Chambers was tasked with giving Noda instructions and money to travel to France to wait for new assignments from the Soviet, he sat the young artist down on a bench by Central Park and gently suggested, “Why don’t you use the time you are waiting [in a hotel in France for the CP directives] to go back to painting? That is what you were meant to do.”58 Schapiro, considered to be Noda’s mentor and by then an “avowed 90

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enemy of the CP,” had given Noda similar advice, advising the gifted artist to return to being a full-time painter.59 Noda, apparently unmoved by either man’s urging, remained committed to taking on the next underground assignment.

Sometime in 1937, Noda briefly met with Chambers again to receive the address

of a location in Brooklyn where Noda would connect with a Russian operative for a new assignment. Chambers noted that Noda’s “mental and physical brightness” had faded and he seemed tired. He recalled standing and watching “Ned” walk away, “something that I did not often do.” He never saw Noda again. Chambers wrote in his autobiography that after reading Noda’s obituary in the New York Times on January 14, 1939, he wondered if the artist was faced with “moments of final terror” before his death, something that the “impressive obituary” omitted. Dubious about the official cause of death—a cerebral tumor that robbed Noda of his eyesight in the final months of his short life, as described by his good friend Terada—Chambers suspected that there might be more to the story, that Noda might have “‘been shot by them or shot by us,’” in other words, that Noda might have been liquidated by either the Russians (to protect intelligence) or the American anti-Communist operatives.60 The mystery surrounding Noda’s death and underground activities remains, and it may prove to be impossible to ascertain the real extent of his involvement—the FBI’s inquiries in 1949–51 yielded no significant discoveries concerning Noda’s espionage activities.61 But it suffices to say that this episode evidences Noda’s commitment to his beliefs, which was so strong that he was willing to go beyond the safe confines of his studio, leaving behind a burgeoning career and a young wife, to risk his life. In hindsight, the rather gloomy cityscapes that Noda produced from 1936 to 1938, with their notso-subtle tinge of unease or even suspicion, could be regarded as manifestations of Noda’s secretive, transient, and uncertain existence during that period of his life, as seen in the physically small but pictorially expansive Winter in a City (1937) (figure 54).

Considered in this biographical context, Scottsboro Boys could be understood as

articulating and anticipating Noda’s overarching political commitments and alliance with the Left. Noda registered the Communist Party’s involvement in the case by depicting a piece of paper near the figure’s left leg that bears the letters “C.P.” and “INT” (possibly standing for “International”). Noda thus affirms, albeit subtly, the Party’s vital role in the fight against racism and injustice, and his own affiliation with their cause. Also visible in the lower-right corner of the image are the names of three internationally known CP advocates for workers’ and women’s rights—Sergeĭ Ivanovich Gusev (1874–1933), Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), and Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933)—who all died in June of 1933.62 Gusev began his sustained participation in revolutionary activities in his early twenties and became a lifelong CP member in 1896. Zetkin, a feminist and socialist, was politically active before she turned twenty. She was a founding member of the German Communist Party in 1918, a vocal advocate for international socialism, and a leading figure in the struggle for workers’ and women’s rights, including suffrage. Stokes became a journalist in her early twenties, but her experience working in factories when she was barely a teenager fueled her engagement in advocacy concerning labor and other social issues and struggles. Her We Are Scottsboro Boys

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54 Hideo Noda, Winter in a City, 1937. Oil on board, 10.75 × 17.8 in. 55 (opposite) Hideo Noda, Street at the End of Year (The Hope of the Winter), 1934. Tempera on board, 18.2 × 8.5 in.

commitment to leftist ideals was evident in her writings and her actions, and she was even arrested and charged in 1918 for her public agitation through making antiwar speeches and writing letters. She was a member of the Communist Party’s Central Executive Committee and, like Zetkin, was a staunch advocate for women’s and workers’ rights.63 While the three figures represented different positions on the Left’s ideological spectrum, their deaths in the same month likely prompted Noda to unite them in the same painting. In effect, he not only paid homage to the revolutionary figures’ accomplishments but also invoked them as inspirational guides both in the universal struggle for justice and equality and for him personally.

With Patterson/Wright on the left and the leftist fighters’ names on the right,

Scottsboro Boys could be viewed as a pictorial statement connecting the plight of the Boys with the laborers and the downtrodden’s struggle for socioeconomic equality. Noda’s painting foregrounds the underlying racism in the Scottsboro case (“Jim Crow” on the figure’s left leg). At the same time, the artist visually reinforces his critique of a society indifferent to the suffering of the disenfranchised by picturing homeless people sleeping on the ground right under a building plastered with a “floor to let” sign, and depicting fellow Americans (including a nun, perhaps representing religious people and compassion) as ghostly and indifferent figures. Unlike most pictorial works about the famous trials, which focus mainly on racism, Noda’s Scottsboro Boys stands out as a rare (single-frame) image that visualizes the links between racial and socioeconomic inequality. Another exception is the illustrated booklet Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts, by Lin Shi Khan and Tony Perez, which deploys a series of graphics to narrate and decry capitalistic American society’s 92

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systemic oppression of the labor class and African Americans.64 Noda’s Scottsboro Boys could also be regarded as one of the young artist’s first representations of the disenfranchised, ushering in a series of works in which he paid attention to the laborers, the downtrodden, or people overlooked or ignored by a prejudicial society. Experiencing poverty in his CSFA days—a drastic status change from his uncle’s wealthy household—likely informed or enhanced Noda’s affinity with the working class. Depictions of workers, some belonging to racial minorities, recurred with higher frequency after Scottsboro Boys, as his commitment to leftist ideals became more pronounced. Race, or racism, had a lot to do with the prevailing prejudice, as Noda suggested in his imagery from this period. In Street at the End of Year (The Hope of the Winter) (1934), for example, a dark figure mysteriously emerges from the lower part of the canvas, populated with industrial structures and workers. The black man’s direct gaze engages the viewer and shows a mixed expression of exhaustion and defiance (figure 55).65 In Entrance to Subway (1934), painted in watercolor with the same brown overlay seen in both Scottsboro Boys and The Hope of the Winter, Noda presents an industrial view of a city bustling with construction of buildings and even statues—perhaps a reference to the various public art projects, among other things, taking place in the city at the time (figure 56). Elaborating on his collage-like composition, Noda merges the figures with structures so that they become integral parts of a scene that clearly highlights workers: a shoeshine man in the foreground and a black man in a cap who looms large over the cityscape. In Inside of a Bus (1937), Noda goes a step further by placing the figures with darker skin up against the picture plane, essentially framing the imagined viewer within the compact space shared by those in the foreground (figure 57). It is unclear if Noda based this on his view of an American or a European city, as he was in New York, Oakland (for the Piedmont mural), Paris, and Amsterdam in 1937, before traveling to Japan toward the end of the year. But the disconnectedness between the figures—all have large eyes that look empty and do not engage others’—and the contrasting skin colors of those We Are Scottsboro Boys

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56 Hideo Noda, Entrance to Subway, 1934. Watercolor, 10.2 × 12.8 in. 57 Hideo Noda, Inside of a Bus, 1937. Oil on canvas, 10.75 × 17.9 in.

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sharing the close quarters of a bus seem to point to an invisible distance or barrier between various ethnicities and classes. But Noda’s main focus, the black woman in a yellow hat and fur-collared coat, has a smile that distinguishes her from the rest of expressionless and impassive passengers. With her big, oval eyes that do not quite engage the viewer but instead indicate her mind is somewhere else than the tedium of public transit, Noda’s figure injects into a mundane scene a tinge of optimism, or at least intrigue, that adds another layer of possible interpretations for the viewer.

By foregrounding working-class people of color in paint-

ings about America, including Scottsboro Boys, Noda registered personal significance in his imagery. For Noda, as a member of a minority and a diasporic American, also identified with the perceived “otherness” of the people he depicted. His figures served as productive components in his pictorial strategy of creating imagery that tackled racial, sociopolitical, and economic issues from the perspective of a minority artist. Between 1933 and 1938 (when a brain tumor impaired his eyesight), Noda produced many oil and watercolor/gouache paintings, as well as small drawings and sketches, that demonstrate his attentiveness in observing the subtle interactions between diverse city dwellers of various socioeconomic classes. In deceptively simple lines, Noda rendered workers who perform menial jobs, such as the one-eyed man in his Shoeshine Man (1936), with care and emotion

58 Hideo Noda, Shoeshine Man of New York, 1936. Pencil, 6.4 × 4.8 in.

(figure 58). Judging by the rate at which he captured working urban dwellers, producing at least a couple of dozen known drawings within two or three years, one could say that Noda was assembling a portfolio of the real faces of a city, through which he could help his viewers see and perhaps understand those who did not otherwise get much attention. These portraits and depictions point to Noda’s identification with the workers and his personal investment in bringing into sharper focus the hard-knock life and daily struggle of laborers and, more broadly, people relegated to the margins of the society. In this context, one could argue that Scottsboro Boys was the painting that launched Noda’s dedicated efforts to create imagery that engaged discourses of American modernism in both art and the sociopolitical issues of race, justice, and equality.

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4

In Search of Miki Hayakawa, a Californian Cosmopolitan

Painting is a mirror of one’s own self. . . . If I have any unkindness in my heart, I don’t dare take a brush and paint. One must approach a canvas feeling, in a way, pure.

—Miki Hayakawa, 1940s

Miki Hayakawa (1899–1953), the least studied of the four artists in this book, has enjoyed a surprising resurgence of notice in recent years, thanks to an unprecedented project that harnessed the power of online interactivity and social media. In the summer of 2014, the Art Everywhere US campaign asked five U.S. art museums to select twenty works from their collections and submit digital images to be placed on a website.1 After the public reportedly cast some 170,000 votes, 58 works made the final cut and were displayed on thousands of billboards, bus stops, buildings, and other advertising channels in the United States in August 2014. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) included Hayakawa’s Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926) in their submission (figure 59). While the oil painting was not chosen for the final exhibition, being on the campaign’s long list increased its online presence, as it was reblogged on numerous social media platforms. In fact, Hayakawa’s portrait had received international attention even before this digital art exhibition, thanks to its appearance in America: Painting a Nation (2013–2014), an exhibition aiming at introducing “three centuries of American art and identity” to audiences in Australia.2 The portrait of an African American man by Hayakawa, a Japanese émigré in the United States, in effect served as an example of the kind of multicultural American modernism that LACMA wished to present on the international stage.

The newfound fame that Hayakawa’s portrait has gained belies, ironically, the

fact that little is known about the painting, the artist, her oeuvre, or the extent of her contributions to California’s modern art. Since the museum acquired Portrait of a Negro in 2004 (when I first encountered the painting), no focused analysis or research has been published on the work or the artist. While Hayakawa’s name has made brief

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59 Miki Hayakawa, Portrait of a Negro, 1926. Oil on canvas, 26 × 20 in. Photo © 2016 Museum Associates / LACMA.

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appearances in several art-historical surveys, the existing biographical sketches thus far only show a general outline of a talented artist, born in 1904 in Hokkaido, Japan, who achieved some recognition in California’s art circles in the interwar years. After attending the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco in the 1920s, Hayakawa established herself as an active member of multiple local art associations and showed in numerous group exhibitions throughout the late twenties and thirties. After spending some years on the Monterey Peninsula in the 1930s and the East Bay in the early 1940s, Hayakawa moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, sometime in 1942, when Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were displaced and forced into internment camps. She stayed active in Santa Fe’s art community, where she married artist Preston McCrossen in 1947, but died only six years later, at the age of forty-nine.3

These sketches, while helpful, contain many inconsistent, uncorroborated, and,

in some cases, erroneous biographical details that have circulated over the years. One oft-repeated story seems to have originated from the press release for a Hayakawa retrospective organized by the now-defunct Santa Fe East Gallery in 1985: “Miki might never have come to New Mexico had it not been for World War II. She came, not as an artist, but as a victim of the war hysteria which uprooted naturalized citizens of Japanese ancestry. Separated from her family, Miki was sent to the Santa Fe War Relocation Center, but was released on her own recognizance.”4 Portraying Hayakawa as a casualty of wartime racism and injustice probably added a degree of allure to her work that might have appealed to potential buyers. The problem with the gallery’s statement, however, is that while New Mexico did have a camp for incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry (labeled “enemy aliens” after Pearl Harbor), the “camp” set up in the state by the U.S. Department of Justice and the army functioned as a detention center and a prison that incarcerated only male inmates—some 4,555 men had stayed there at one point between March 1942 and June 1945.5 Hayakawa, an unmarried woman in her late thirties, would not have been grouped with the men, especially those who were unduly deemed to be “threats” to national security and thus segregated from their families incarcerated in other internment camps. While the Japanese American Internee Data File maintained by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration shows that Hayakawa’s parents, Man and Chiyo Hayakawa of Alameda, California, were moved to the Tanforan Assembly Center and then the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, she is nowhere to be found in the files associated with her parents’ relocation.6 Neither was she registered or recorded as an “enemy alien” in Santa Fe.7

This is only one example of the difficulty of reconstructing a clearer and accurate

picture of Hayakawa’s life. Exacerbating the challenge is that those who supposedly knew her, either directly or indirectly, seem over the years to have created mythologized versions of her life. Uncorroborated stories include her father “disowning” her when she was a teenager because of her desire to become an artist, her being mistakenly imprisoned in the camp only to be furtively rescued by local artists who worked as camp guards, and her marrying fellow artist McCrossen to obtain a “more 98

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Caucasian last name.” It has also been suggested that McCrossen’s and Hayakawa’s papers (at one point in the possession of the Santa Fe East Gallery) ended up in landfills somewhere.8 Such narratives, some likely with folkloric embellishments, certainly add color to Hayakawa’s biography and probably enhance the salability of her work. However, they do not offer verifiable evidence to aid a research project that aims to rediscover Hayakawa’s artistic production and contextualize her extant works in their proper artistic milieu. For many years, the whereabouts of the majority of her works, many of which were sold into private collections, were also unknown, making it especially challenging for me and other scholars and curators to grasp the true extent of her oeuvre.

In this chapter, I present my research findings to

date, after locating more than fifty paintings and drawings by or attributed to Hayakawa. Having combed through collections and archives, I have come to learn more about an émigré artist who was as accomplished as many well-known California painters. In fact, Hayakawa started gaining critical attention as early as 1925, only a few years after she began formal art training. That year, she won a First Award in the portrait-painting class at CSFA and showed two paintings in the forty-eighth annual exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) (figure 60). She went on to win the third prize at the Berkeley League’s annual

60 Miki Hayakawa, A Young Man, 1925. Dimensions unknown.

exhibition in 1926.9 Also in 1926, her painting Yakima Indian Girl was one of the twentyfive works selected from the Oakland art annual by Eugen Neuhaus, an art professor at the University of California, Berkeley, to receive a special showing at the school’s Havilland Hall.10 In 1927, competing against some nine hundred CSFA students, she won the Virgil Williams scholarship, another among many accolades that Hayakawa accumulated within the first years of her career.11 In the following decade and a half, the talented and ambitious artist established herself as a critically recognized member of the San Francisco Bay Area art scene and more than held her own in major exhibitions alongside fellow male colleagues, including the respected modernist Stanton McDonald Wright (1890–1973), the CSFA dean Eric Spencer Macky (1880–1958), and the UC Berkeley art professor Chiura Obata (1885–1975), to name only a few.

The main focus of this chapter is on Hayakawa’s artistic production before World

War II, with a brief section on her Santa Fe period, for several reasons. My investigations over the years have uncovered works that can be confidently placed within the time frame of Hayakawa’s residency in California, up to about 1940 or so. Some postwar works attributed to her require more provenance research and authentication and are omitted from this delimited examination. A full assessment of Hayakawa’s In Search of Miki

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oeuvre would require a dedicated book-length project, and my study here aims to offer only the first analyses of a few select works that relate to the visual strategies of other diasporic artists in this book. Like them, Hayakawa deployed art as a productive mode of engaging the communities that she came in contact with throughout her life. As she stated, the act of painting reflects “one’s own self” and reveals any “unkindness” or impurities within. Hayakawa thus approached her pictorial subjects with genuine interest and gravitas, evident in her meticulous and affectionate renditions of her models. In other words, painting and figuration served as her vital means for not only connecting with disparate people and affirming a sense of belonging, but also constructing her identity as a cosmopolitan artist who confidently traversed racially and culturally diverse collectives of artists and intellectuals. The resulting portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes, despite their seemingly straightforward subject matter, are nuanced and full of visual intrigue that requires prolonged engagement on her viewers’ part. Especially in her oil paintings, she used the medium to articulate complex visual rhetoric through consciously manipulating and blending formal elements from divergent artistic traditions and, in turn, engaging the vibrant and heterogeneous modernism taking shape in pre–World War II California.

As the first scholarly attempt to offer dedicated analyses of Hayakawa’s artistic pro-

duction and reconstruct the artist’s remarkable but forgotten career, my chapter also foregrounds her life story as a compelling version of those all-too-common narratives of how Pearl Harbor and the subsequent forced relocation uprooted and disrupted the promising artistic development of Americans and immigrants of Japanese descent. While I acknowledge that my research is incomplete, I hope this chapter will serve as a catalyst for more scholarly and public attention on and interest in Hayakawa, which, in turn, may help recover her other works from obscurity. Portrait of a Negro and Multicultural California Modernism Little is known about Hayakawa’s Portrait of a Negro. LACMA dates the painting “ca. 1926,” which would make it a student work, for the CSFA enrollment records indicate that Hayakawa was still in school between June 1923 and spring 1926.12 Other sources show that Hayakawa’s association with CSFA extended beyond 1926, as she was winning student scholarships from the school in 1927 and reportedly served as a “classroom monitor” at one point in 1929 or so, as artist Edward Takeo Terada recalls in his essay about his good friend and fellow CSFA student Hideo Benjamin Noda.13 In Hayakawa’s portrait, a young man dressed in a blue suit with a bowtie sits in front of a red backdrop, filling the picture frame. The top of his head, a sliver of his right arm, and his lower legs are cropped off, rendering the composition somewhat incomplete. The body is awkwardly foreshortened from the forearms to the crossed fingers, and the left arm looks disproportionately large and round. The varying shades of blue, made up of visible crosshatches of oil paint, render the torso flat and sketchy—note especially the large strokes that depict the meeting of his neck and his white shirt and collar. But there is nothing unfinished about the man’s face. Carefully constructed 100

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through amalgamating facets of paint in colors that range from red, brown, and green to blue, black, and white, the model’s face looks substantial in volume, musculature, and vitality. His broad forehead, full cheeks, ample lips, and cleft chin all contribute to the depiction of a handsome man in possession of a luminous quality that seems to emanate from his smooth and reflective skin as well as from within. His eyes, glinting with intensity, complete a dignified portrait.

Depicted in three-quarter profile, the man looks to the side, just beyond the picture

frame. The pose adds a sense of introspection, as if he were captured in a moment of deep thought. It also creates a slight distance between the figure and the viewer—and perhaps the artist, by implication—for without returning the imagined viewer’s gaze, the man in the picture appears to remain in his own solitary contemplation, disengaged from the rest of the world. This would become a common pictorial device that Hayakawa deployed throughout her figurative oeuvre. Hayakawa portrayed many models immersed in their own worlds, such as in her 1925 portrait of the melancholic young man (figure 60); an undated and untitled portrait of a young man playing a ukulele (figure 61); and the undated Music, featuring a similar figure seated at a table. The ukulele player leans against a curious backdrop with radiating patterns that visualize, one might imagine, the melodic vibrations that the musical instrument produces.14 The man’s face is sculptural and faceted, whereas his body is an amorphous and disproportionate flow of gradating white paint that also seems to manifest the music, as it cascades down the torso in the direction of the ukulele. Along with the diagonal instrument, the curvy folds and the broad brushstrokes of grayish shadows on his shirt (painterly effects also found in Portrait of a Negro) give the compact composition a strong sense of movement and rhythm. The man is possibly the same model as the one in Music, for both figures share eyebrows that peak at the ends, grooves under the eyes, and a strong Greco-Roman nose. And the same instrument is prominently featured in both images. Similar to the way an unknown light source illuminates and shapes the man’s face in Portrait of a Negro, in both music-themed portraits light coming in from beyond the picture frame highlights and gives form to the man’s facial features. While Hayakawa depicts the ukulele player from a closer place (suggesting a sense of intimacy with the model) than in Portrait of a Negro, or from a hovering position in Music (heightened by the severely tilted table), all three figures seem lost in their ruminations, unaware of or detached from the viewer/artist.

Portrait of a Negro can be dated to 1926 thanks to the existence of a companion

painting, Artist Studio (1926) by Yun Gee (1906–1963), a fellow artist and a CSFA graduate (figure 62).15 In lieu of provenance records, Gee’s Artist Studio serves as a rare “visual authentication” of Hayakawa’s portrait.16 Gee deploys a kind of semiabstraction, diametrically different from Hayakawa’s realism, to depict a scene in which a woman with a palette is painting a seated man with a bowtie. Instead of Hayakawa’s meticulous blending of colors to render the model’s head, Gee uses broad patches of vibrant hues and visible brushstrokes lining up in all directions to build up the figures in the foreground and in the back. Further disregarding pictorial realism, Gee paints the sitter in juxtaposing and gradating greens, blues, whites, and reds, and the In Search of Miki

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61  Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Young Man Playing Ukulele), n.d. Oil on canvas, 20 × 26 in.

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woman’s elongated torso in cascading shades of greens, yellows, reds, and blues. The rectangular palette in the figure’s left hand curves on the lower side, connecting both the painter and the model to another figure in what appears to be a canvas on an easel and highlighting a signature, “Miki H.” As if demonstrating his versatile skill and their stylistic differences, Gee gives the Miki canvas a figure with an outlined and incomplete body but a recognizable face. Gee presents a painterly figure, consisting of patches of colors, that mediates between Hayakawa’s subtle construction of forms and his own abstraction, which is illustrated by the blue-and-green sitter in the middle. The side-byside contrast between the figures, separated only by a thin line conveying the canvas’s border, offers a visual dialogue between representational and abstract figurations. As such, Gee’s painting could be regarded as an acknowledgment of diverse approaches in the kind of modern art that was being produced by him and his fellow artists in San Francisco.

The pair of paintings, along with Otis William Oldfield’s Portrait of Yun Gee (1926),

also in LACMA’s collections, form a trio of images that indeed points to the San Francisco Bay Area’s multiethnic artistic milieu, in which Hayakawa developed as an artist (figure 63). Oldfield (1890–1969), an accomplished artist from Sacramento, California, and an art professor at CSFA at the time, created the portrait in a pictorial language that could be described as a middle ground between Hayakawa’s and Gee’s.17 Constructed with passages of colors and visible brushstrokes as seen in Hayakawa’s portrait, Oldfield’s representational figure also has broad areas of paint application that flatten (and make semiabstract) the image to some extent—note, for example, the man’s right arm and shoulder. In a review of a group show at the Paul Elder Gallery in San Francisco, the critic for the Argus called Oldfield’s painting (entitled Portrait of Yun in the exhibition) an “excellent canvas from the standpoint of color, proportion, depth and perspective.” But the reviewer also complained that Oldfield’s depiction of Gee as a “mature and stern man” was an “altogether different conception to that which most people who know Yun have of this artist.”18 The critic seemed to be grappling with the discrepancy between the outgoing public persona of an active and “genuine young Chinese painter” (Gee was twenty or so in 1926) and Oldfield’s depiction of a serious, introspective, and evidently older man (figure 64). But it could be argued that what Otis offered was an honest and intimate portrayal of the good friend he knew well—Helen Oldfield, Otis’s wife, recalled that Gee, who accompanied Otis on a painting trip to the Sierras in 1926, was a “very devoted disciple” and could not “do enough” for Oldfield.19

Around the same time the trio of portraits was painted, Gee and Oldfield, along

with several compatriots, established the Modern Gallery. Hayakawa, while not involved, knew many of the founding artists and lived less than a mile away from the gallery, at 321 Chestnut Street, according to an exhibition label on the back of Portrait of a Negro.20 The gallery was located near the storied “Montgomery Block,” also called the “Monkey Block,” on the eastern edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown and in the shadow of the landmark Transamerica Pyramid today. The block was home or temporary refuge for many luminaries, including writers Mark Twain and Jack London, In Search of Miki

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62  Yun Gee, Artist Studio, 1926. Oil on paperboard, 12 × 9 in. Photo © 2016 Museum Associates / LACMA.

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63 Otis Oldfield, Portrait of Yun Gee, 1926. Oil on canvas, 18 × 16 in. Photo © 2016 Museum Associates / LACMA. © 2016 Estate of Otis Oldfield / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

as well as Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China. Artists also set up studios in the area; Gee, for example, listed his address as 722 Montgomery Street in the SFAA’s Forty-Ninth Annual Exhibition catalogue in 1927.21 Following the inaugural display of works by all ten founding artists from November 1–15, 1926, in the second half of the month Gee was the first to hold a one-person show at the gallery. The plan was for each artist to take turns and stage solo shows. In addition to Gee, the founding artists included Dorr Bothwell, Ruth Cravath, Frank Dunham, Ward Montague, Rosalie Manus, Parker Hall, Julius Pommer, Marian Trace, and Don Works. 22 The significance of the Modern Gallery, as a writer for the Argus stated, was that it acted as a “fine stimulant” among the younger artists of the Bay Area and increased the public’s interest in art.23 Indeed, the gallery’s robust exhibition programming—one display every two weeks since its first show in November 1926, according to the Argus In Search of Miki

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writer—afforded local artists the opportunity to hold one-person showcases, and many participated in its group exhibitions as well.

Hayakawa did not appear on the gallery’s

exhibition roster, but she was no doubt familiar and associated with the artist collective. In addition to Gee and other colleagues, her future husband, McCrossen, who was residing in Mill Valley at the time, held a one-man exhibition at the gallery in March of 1927. Born in Clyde, Michigan, in 1894, McCrossen was trained at the Detroit School of Fine Arts (1910–18), during which time he went to Europe on the school’s scholarship for two years, starting in 1914.24 Having moved to California by way of Taos, New Mexico, he was very active in his brief tenure in the San Francisco Bay art scene, and in 1927 his name frequently appeared in the Argus.25 There is no direct evidence thus far to prove that McCrossen and Hayakawa had a relationship back then, but they both were in the SFAA’s annual exhibition in 1927 (Hayakawa showed Lucille, Nude, and Portrait, while McCrossen showed Woman Sewing), both were involved with the Berkeley League of Fine Arts, and both were colleagues 64 Photo of Yun Gee, late 1920s.

and friends of Gee, Oldfield, and other local artists connected to the Modern Gallery. These associations suggest that they likely would have been acquaintances, if not friends, during McCrossen’s short stay in the area.26 Such connections also help support the speculation that McCrossen may have been partly responsible for Hayakawa’s move to New Mexico, either by aiding her or by vouching for her in the midst of the post–Pearl Harbor anti-Japanese hysteria. Mateo Lettunich (1918–2013), a longtime friend of Hayakawa and a resident of Carmel, California, offered a tantalizing clue when he donated the ukulele player’s portrait: “A kind older man took her [Hayakawa] to Santa Fe for the war years; she died there,” Lettunich wrote in a statement accompanying his donation, possibly referring to McCrossen, who was ten years older than Hayakawa.27

Another significance of the Modern Gallery is that its membership reflected the

broader progressive milieu in San Francisco, in which minority artists (in terms of race and, at least among artists, gender) like Hayakawa and Gee were able to flourish. A survey of local group exhibitions reveals that although women were certainly underrepresented in comparison to the numbers of men who seemed to be in every show, many female artists regularly showed works of a wide variety of subject matter and media. For instance, there were four female artists among the initial ten members of 106

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the Modern Gallery: Bothwell, Cravath, Manus, and Trace. Gertrude Boyle Kanno, an accomplished sculptor and Eitarō Ishigaki’s one-time companion, served as a sculpture juror for the 1934 Oakland Art Gallery Annual Exhibition and showed three works, including busts of the famed California writer Joaquin Miller and artist William Keith.28 Hisako Shimizu Hibi (1907–1991), Hayakawa’s friend and a fellow CSFA graduate, showed alongside Hayakawa in the 1937 Oakland Art Gallery’s annual exhibition and the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, to name only two examples. But Hayakawa held the distinction of being the Japanese woman artist who exhibited most consistently with various local groups of artists in the pre–World War II years, though she was by no means the only one who was active and who deserves more scholarly attention.29 In the Haviland Hall exhibition in 1926, for example, two other Japanese male artists accompanied Hayakawa: Kenjiro Nomura (1896–1956) from Seattle and Sakari Suzuki (1899–1995) from San Francisco.30 When Hayakawa showed three paintings in the SFAA’s annual exhibition in 1927, she was joined by Suzuki, Koichi Nomiyama (1900–1984), Masaki Umekubo, Matsusaburo Hibi (1886– 1947; husband of Hisako Hibi), and Obata—all male immigrants from Japan. In the SFAA’s Fiftieth Annual Exhibition in 1928, Hayakawa was the only female Japanese émigré among the eleven artists of Japanese descent with fourteen works included in the show.31 And when the San Francisco Museum of Art, the predecessor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, staged its inaugural exhibition of American art in the Civic Center in 1935, Hayakawa was once again the only Japanese woman in this landmark show. Eight male artists of Japanese descent were represented, along with three male artists of Chinese descent.32

The sustained presence of artists of Japanese and Chinese descent in the local art

scenes is noteworthy here, considering the exclusionary historical backdrop against which the artists worked. The Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson-Reed Act, was a U.S. federal law that limited immigration quotas based on national origin. As an expansion of the 1917 Act, a restrictive immigration law that denied entry to those born in the “Asiatic Barred Zone” (except Japan, the Philippines, and China, whose citizens were already barred from immigration under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), the 1924 Act excluded all Asians from being able to obtain immigration visas.33 Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States had been widespread since the late nineteenth century. The longstanding xenophobic attitude toward Asian immigrants, and the various anti-Japanese movements in California and elsewhere in the country, eventually led to the mass relocation and incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II.34

The trio of portraits created by Hayakawa, Gee, and Oldfield on the heels of the

Immigration Act served, one could argue, as the visual artists’ implicit repudiation of the zealous anti-immigration rhetoric. Judging by the active contributions of artists of Japanese and Asian descent to interwar San Francisco Bay Area arts and culture, there appears to have been a disjuncture between the discriminatory immigration legislation and genuine interethnic and intercultural alliances that the artists formed. Take Hayakawa as an example: her country of origin did not prevent the largest art In Search of Miki

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association in San Francisco from reproducing her A Young Man in its catalogue in 1925, nor did it deter the jury from giving her the First Award in the portrait painting class at CSFA, also in 1925—both against the backdrop of the enactment of the anti-Asian exclusionary law. Newspapers and critics reviewed, with neither explicit nor implicit racial undertones, exhibitions that featured Asian artists, such as Gee’s solo shows at the Modern Gallery and Hayakawa’s one-person exhibition in 1929—more on this soon.35 These records suggest that progressive artists and intelligentsia refused to heed the xenophobes’ warnings against the so-called Yellow Peril, a perception of East Asian immigrants as the “menace from the Orient” that would steal other Americans’ jobs or, worse yet, “infect” American society with racial, cultural, and religious impurities, as the specious belief went, if they were uncontained and unsuppressed.36

However, working with open-minded colleagues did not mean that the broader

anti-Asian sentiments were lost on artists of Japanese descent. Their determined and sustained participation in local art groups—like that by Hayakawa—was only one of their vital means to demonstrate, among other things, that they were productive and contributive members of a multicultural society and thus did not deserve to be treated with prejudice. Some organized their own collectives, which were decidedly heterogeneous in both their membership’s racioethnic demographics and the types of artwork they showcased. In late 1921, for example, artists and lifelong friends Obata and Matsusaburo Hibi founded the East West Art Society, born out of “ardent desire for researches of Occidental and Oriental Arts and . . . a highest Idealism where the East unites with the West, desire which had long been cherished among us, young and ever aspiring painters, musicians, and dramatists, poets and writers.”37 The society sponsored and promoted exhibitions of visual work, musical performances, and lectures on literature that brought together creative compatriots of divergent national and ethnic origins. Following up on its first exhibition of paintings in early 1922, the society’s second exhibition, later that year, was an ambitious feast of the arts, opening on November 17 and 19 with two days of performances and activities. The opening-day program offered, among many things, kotobuki, a classical Japanese dance accompanied by a shamisen (a fretted string instrument) and drum; a koto (a thirteen-stringed zither) solo of kagura, or Shinto sacred music;38 piano, string, and vocal performances of music by Schubert, Bruch, Beethoven, Schumann, and Puccini; a dance by Miss Koba Toshi, one of the promising students in the Mahr-Mieczkowski Russian Ballet School (located at 384 Sutter Street in San Francisco); displays of ikebana (flower arrangements) of chrysanthemums by the society’s members; and tea service by Japanese girls in their “native costume” (likely kimonos). In all, twenty-seven visual artists submitted works to the show, including non-Japanese artists such as Ray Boynton, Ching Lee, Spencer and Constance Macky, Perham W. Nahl, Nicolai Nedashkovsky, and Ralph Wilkins, to name only a few. And many more performing artists contributed to the vibrant programs that celebrated the opening of the exhibition.

Writing for the Bulletin, critic Dolores Waldorf opined that judging by the exhi-

bition itself, East and West “do not meet and they do not mingle as far as art is concerned.” She praised the “Oriental genius for composition and imaginative 108

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treatment,” something that she thought the Occident could borrow a little from to make the world of art a “most harmonious place.” Lamenting that “the tendency seems to be toward an Oriental scooping up of the Occidental stupidity in choosing subject matter for pictures,” she also offered that those Japanese who “chose to remain in their own realm of art proved themselves nothing less than masters.”39 Waldorf’s somewhat contradictory appraisal exemplifies some contemporary critics’ grappling with crossracial, cross-cultural mixings in artistic production. Seemingly bound by a dichotomous conception of “East vs. West” differences, Waldorf appreciated what “Oriental” artists brought to their art but at the same time appeared to expect them to produce only work that could be demonstrably perceived to be “Oriental” in style and character—without defining exactly what she meant by either term in such prescription. While writing that it would be beneficial for Occidental artists to learn from their colleagues from the East, Waldorf all but dismissed the possibility or desirability for an Asian artist to convey Euro-American subjects in non-Oriental pictorial languages or means.

Japanese artists in California were not content to “remain in their own realm of

art,” however. On the contrary, they showcased a myriad of styles, techniques, and subject matter in both quality and quantity. While Hayakawa missed the opportunity to participate in the East West Art Society’s event in 1922, she enthusiastically took part in the two Amateur and Professional Art Exhibitions in 1929 and 1930, organized by the San Francisco Japanese Artists Association, a follow-up group of sorts to the society, which appears to have had fizzled after its inaugural fanfare. Spearheaded by Matsusaburo Hibi, the first exhibition of the Japanese Artists Association offered a rich display of 132 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, and sculptures by thirty-five artists of Japanese descent. Hayakawa submitted eight works to the first show. They had a variety of subject matter, judging by the titles in the list of artwork, such as Summer in Waldo and Hydrangea. Hayakawa’s friends the Hibis (married in 1930) had eight works together in the exhibition. Her fellow CSFA graduates and current students also made a strong showing: the three inseparable friends, Noda, Terada, and Inokuma (see chapter 3), each had eleven works; Sakari Suzuki, Henry Yuzuru Sugimoto (1900–1990), and other CSFA-trained artists had multiple works on display as well.40

The exhibition venue, Kinmon Gakuen, or the Golden Gate Institute, located at

2031 Bush Street in San Francisco, is historically significant. Its mission was to improve the education of Japanese immigrants’ children, but it also became a culture center of sorts, hosting art shows, including Hayakawa’s first solo exhibition, also in 1929. The institute was established in 1911 in response to the influx of Japanese immigrants since the late nineteenth century; by 1908 there were approximately 138,800 in the United States, about 70 percent of whom chose to reside in California, according to one count.41 The broader anti-Japanese sentiments were manifested in legislation concerning issues ranging from labor and commerce to education, with laws imposing stricter regulation on foreign-language schools. Local Japanese community leaders in the Japanese American Association in San Francisco came together to find ways to ensure that their children received necessary and quality education. The main purpose of Kinmon Gakuen was thus to supplement the public education of children of Japanese In Search of Miki

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immigrants with Japanese-language classes, but the school also offered English to help prepare preschool students for entry into the public education system. The facilities were initially designed to accommodate 50 kindergarten and 50 elementary students, but by 1916 its student population had grown to 144. The school’s curriculum continued to expand as well. By the time the San Francisco Japanese Artists Association held its first salon at the Institute in 1929, it was offering eight years of courses at the elementary school level, two years at the middle school level, and two years at the high school level. The topics ranged from Japanese writing and speech abilities, penmanship in brush and pencil, and Japanese history to singing, ikebana, etiquette, and ethics.42 By hosting fine art exhibitions, the Golden Gate Institute further established itself as a vital center for the artistic and cultural life of Japanese residents and their friends in San Francisco. The Artistic Flourishing of a Cosmopolitan Woman It was at Kinmon Gakuen that Hayakawa staged her first solo show, or “debut,” as the San Francisco Chronicle called it: an impressive display of more than 150 major paintings, mostly nudes, with some landscapes and still lifes.43 None of the three newspaper reviews of Hayakawa’s exhibition that I have found include any reproductions of her artwork. But one can assume, based on their approximate dates of creation, that her large and ambitious female nude from 1928 in the New Mexico Museum of Art’s (NMMA) collections (figure 65) and the untitled female nude reproduced in the California School of Fine Art’s 1927–28 catalogue (figure 66)—which could be the work for which Hayakawa was awarded the Virgil Williams scholarship in 1927—were included in the exhibition.44 Like many other figurative paintings created by Hayakawa (e.g., the ukulele player), the nudes are situated in layered and patterned settings that offer the artist a chance to showcase her dexterous handling of oil paint and brush to create varied textures. In the NMMA nude, Hayakawa renders the model’s skin smooth and luminous, with a tinge of red peeking through that echoes shades of the same hue in the cloth draped on the model’s chair, the chair itself, and the backdrop that frames her torso. The undulating lines that shape the body correspond to the organic floral designs in the background, which simultaneously demarcate and envelop the figure. With her eyes closed, the flurry of vines and blooms behind the impassive model seems to make visible her vibrant and passionate inner world, similar to the way that the patterns behind the ukulele player seem to suggest his musical musings. The CSFA nude, on the other hand, has geometric shapes in the background (and on the bowl or basket on the bench) that contrast with and foreground the pristinely constructed nude. Both paintings illustrate Hayakawa’s expert modeling of the human figure. Note, for example, her convincing treatment of the right knees and legs on both models, and the right arm in the NMMA nude, through subtle shading and gradation that convey the weight and substance of the skeletal structure underneath the soft and shimmering skin. Similar to the diverted gazes in many of her portraits, neither of the women engages the viewer, adding a sense of introspection to Hayakawa’s representations. 110

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65  Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Seated Female Nude), 1928, oil on canvas, 36 × 28.5 in. © Miki Hayakawa Estate.

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Critics

unanimously

re c o g n i z e d

Hayakawa’s artistic talent and skills. A writer for the San Francisco Examiner even went so far as to use the word “genius” in reviewing her work, affirming that her one-artist show more than substantiated the promise that critics and colleagues had seen in her a few years earlier when she began exhibiting professionally. The modest setting and bare space of the Kinmon Gakuen only helped highlight the young artist’s accomplishments and “tremendous industry,” the writer pointed out, for in addition to the 150 works on display, Hayakawa acknowledged that she had some 50 more at home, meaning that she had painted “fifty to a hundred very credible paintings every year” for the past four years. There was no “slipshod work” in the show, the reviewer determined, and commended Hayakawa’s keen observation and “supple fingers.” Hayakawa conveyed beauty through her brush in “irrepressible flashes,” and her work represented “the full blossom of the Occidental art of painting,” the reviewer declared. The review was both a validation of Hayakawa’s artistic merits and an affirmation of San Francisco’s unique achievement as fertile 66 Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Female Nude), 1927. Dimensions unknown.

ground for people from a multitude of cultures to converge, learn from each other, and generate something new and good: “here, if any where, the East and the West will meet and pool their talents and begin new creative romances in cultural history.”45

The reviewer was Gobind Behari Lal (1889–1982), an immigrant from Delhi, India,

who had worked as a science reporter for the William Randolph Hearst–owned San Francisco Examiner since 1925 and would enjoy an illustrious career as a respected science writer and editor for nearly six decades, including becoming the co-winner of the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished reporting. His review of Hayakawa’s exhibition may appear to be an anomaly in his journalistic oeuvre. But Lal, throughout his career, also interviewed influential figures not only in science and medicine, such as physicists Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, but also in literature and politics, such as Mohandas K. Gandhi, Sherwood Anderson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It was likely out of his genuine interest in and appreciation of Hayakawa’s art, and his keen eye on the multicultural landscape of San Francisco, that he penned the review. More important, the success of a young Japanese immigrant who demonstrated her mastery of Occidental painting techniques and subject matter probably appealed to Lal, who was himself simultaneously a world citizen in America and an Indian nationalist—he was a staunch advocate for India’s independence and, for his efforts, received the 112

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Padma Bhushan (1969) and the Tamra Patra (1973), two of the Indian government’s highest honors.46 The opening line of his review is worth repeating: “The prophets of a new renaissance have said so often that here, if any where, the East and the West will meet and pool their talents and begin new creative romances in cultural history.” In Hayakawa he saw an exemplary realization of such optimism for a productive and harmonious meeting of cultures and peoples in a thoroughly cosmopolitan city.

Art critics and colleagues apparently concurred with Lal’s assessment, as

Hayakawa’s paintings were selected for and included in a series of major exhibitions after her impressive solo show. Having multiple works in the Japanese Artists Association’s first salon and the Oakland Art League’s annual exhibition, and those 150 paintings at Kinmon Gakuen, all in 1929, further secured Hayakawa’s standing in the local art scene. In the decade that followed, she expanded her engagement with different groups beyond her usual artistic collectives. In addition to having paintings in the annual exhibitions of the SFAA (1931, 1932, 1935) and the Oakland Art League (1933, 1936, 1937), she also took part in a show by the San Francisco Society of Women Artists (1931). She joined group shows in Los Angeles as well, such as the 1936 and 1937 Painters and Sculptors of Southern California annual exhibitions organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Art, where she had previously participated in its 1927 showing;47 and the Oriental Art Exhibit, which took place at the Foundation of Western Art in 1934, to which she sent two works, Tulips and Portrait of a Young Man. The Foundation’s Oriental Art Committee, which included artists Benji Okubo (1904– 1975) and Tyrus Wong (b. 1910) and the noted art critic Arthur Millier (1893–1975), envisioned the exhibition as the first to showcase “modern California Oriental art” and an annual event that would foster new trends in art. Hayakawa sent a landscape to the 1937 Oriental Art Exhibit; Millier described the work as a “capable Northern California style landscape” from an artist residing in Pacific Grove.48

In 1935, three of Hayakawa’s paintings—From My Window, One Afternoon, and

Portrait of a Young Man (figures 67, 68, and 69)—were selected to be in the SFAA’s Fifty-Fifth Annual Exhibition, which served as the formal opening show of the new San Francisco Museum of Art at the War Memorial Building on Van Ness Avenue. The Japanese-English newspaper Kashu Mainichi (Japan-California Daily News) deemed the inclusion of artists of Japanese descent in the museum’s inaugural show a historic event and published a report on its first page, listing all ten artists.49 Showing works in this landmark exhibition was arguably one of the major validations in Hayakawa’s career, and the paintings she submitted represent a pivotal moment in her artistic development as well. Presented in varying formats and scales, Hayakawa’s canvases from this period are ambitious compositions rendered with meticulously nuanced pictorial strategies. The seemingly simple subject matter, such as an urban view or a genre scene, belies the complexity of her visual rhetoric, which was a departure from her earlier, more straightforward portraits.

From My Window was the newest painting of the three, as Hayakawa had shown

One Afternoon in the SFAA’s 1932 exhibition.50 Both From My Window and One Afternoon demonstrate the kind of intricate brushwork that Hayakawa had begun to explore in In Search of Miki

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67 Miki Hayakawa, From My Window, 1935. Oil on canvas, 28 × 28 in.

Portrait of a Negro and the aforementioned female nudes. Note in From My Window, for example, the varied treatment and interplay of the borders between the flower petals and the glass vase in the foreground and between the organic shapes of the plants and the geometrics of the buildings in the background.51 The white and pink bloom consists of soft and furry oval shapes with visible paints that in some cases “bleed” into the background objects, such as the leaves and the vase, distinguishable only by their hues and contrasts. In contrast, the buildings (and some leaves) beyond the balcony have dark lines that demarcate and securely place them on a sloping hill, on top of which sits the new Coit Tower, completed in 1933. Standing at the apex of Hayakawa’s composition, the cylindrical structure barely touches the picture frame, creating an upward tension that counters the downward thrust of the uptilted table and its lining at the bottom of the picture. Uniting the canvas is a consistent application of thin, short, and diagonal brushstrokes that build up all the forms and give every element, including the hard-edged houses, a sense of subtle movement and an overall coruscating effect.52 114

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Another formal element in From My Window that indicates Hayakawa’s maturity

as a painter is her confident mix of hues and contrasts to create visual interest and compositional coherence. Her “orchestration of luminosity,” as I call it, functions like a narrative device for the eye (without there being a “story” per se), as bright spots pop up throughout the canvas. For instance, one’s eye might go from the refracted light from the glass vase that illuminates parts of the table, to the highlighted edges of the flower petals, to the strips of white beyond the patio wall on the right that lead up to the bright beige façade of a building, and then on to the fog-like whitish gray on the left that echoes the thin, almost mist-like slivers of white that outline the skyline. Shuttling between the foreground and the background, between the interior and the exterior, one follows the glimmers to move in and out of various shapes and, as a result, one’s eye dances around a normally static still life or, more precisely in this case, a combination of still life and landscape. The blossoming flowers and plants, set against the view of a populated Telegraph Hill capped by the city’s new engineering achievement, appear to present a vibrant picture of a city trying to recover from the Great Depression. Considering From My Window in the larger historical context, one might cast the reading of Hayakawa’s apparently optimistic or positive urban view in a more ambivalent light: as the artist’s somewhat veiled, certainly restrained commentary on the controversial Coit Tower mural program. The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), under President Roosevelt’s New Deal, had hired an army of artists to decorate the interior walls of the newly finished tower. But, as art historian Anthony W. Lee has detailed, the mural program, which began in January 1934, was plagued by contentious ideological battles, between conservative administrators of the project and the artistic community, that had broken out even before the start of the tower’s construction in 1932. Vicious fights continued throughout the life of the mural project concerning the contents of the murals, deemed radical for some artists’ inclusion of leftist and Marxist references, and prompted a member of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors, Herbert Fleishhacker, to lead a campaign to censor and even destroy the images. Ultimately, the artists, and their murals, prevailed.53

In this context, the pictorial elements in From My Window suggest at least three

possible and divergent readings. Standing tall at the apex of the city and the image, the tower is presented as a victorious symbol of freedom of expression for San Francisco’s artistic collectives, of which Hayakawa was a longtime member. However, Hayakawa’s decision to foreground the attention-grabbing flowers and relegate the tower to the distant background, in effect minimizing it, could also be regarded as a statement about how, staying within the domestic confines, one can be quite removed or protected from the political fray. By implication, she also points to the reality that some San Franciscans, staying in the comfort of their homes, might not know or care about the progressive artists’ battles to preserve their right to paint what they chose. Pushing the critical reading further, one might even view the confining elements that Hayakawa decided to include—the gray, concrete-like areas demarcating the interior space, which could easily have been omitted from the composition—as signifiers of her own perceived position In Search of Miki

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68  Miki Hayakawa, One Afternoon, ca. 1940. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 in. © Miki Hayakawa Estate.

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vis-à-vis the Coit Tower project. Her colleagues, many of whom were arguably not as accomplished as she was, were able to literally leave their marks in history. The picture seems to imply that in her view, she was confined (as the dull walls suggest) to painting a pot of flowers, an ostensibly domestic subject, and could only admire the grand historic accomplishment from afar. Regardless of how one chooses to read the image, the ambivalence that Hayakawa created makes the seemingly ordinary From My Window a carefully calibrated representation of a city view ripe for multiple interpretations.

Hayakawa also deployed deliberate pictorial strategies in the earlier One Afternoon

that resulted in a complex and curious image. One Afternoon consists of some contradictory and confusing elements: while the figure wears delicately rendered folds of fabric that help convey the body’s volume and structure, the floor that the man is resting on seems to extend vertically and lift his lower body upward. Everything seems to be pushed up against the picture plane and flattened; the circular shapes in the lower left corner (representing fruits, perhaps), the heater by the figure’s feet (near Hayakawa’s signature), and the pot of calla lilies all appear like cutouts. The baseboard and the door in the background compress the visual space in the painting as well.

The kind of nonlinear perspective in One Afternoon recurs in Hayakawa’s oeuvre. It

is a hybrid pictorial strategy because, while grounded in Western realism in technique and medium, Hayakawa’s image also references the divergent perspectival systems seen in Northern Renaissance religious imagery (the tables in Music and From My Window remind one of that in the Mérode Altarpiece by the fifteenth-century Flemish artist Robert Campin, to cite a textbook example), seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Japanese ukiyo-e, late nineteenth-century French paintings à la Japonisme, and early American folk art. Judging by her known works, Hayakawa appears to have been consistent in seamlessly blending pictorial languages and techniques from multiple artistic traditions to generate great visual interest in seemingly ordinary genre scenes and figurative imagery. Such an amalgamating pictorial strategy, one could argue, also served to assert and foreground Hayakawa’s identity as a diasporic artist creating “cosmopolitan” imagery—pictures that juxtapose, merge, and traverse cultures.

The hybrid pictorial strategy serves other purposes as well. Complicating the

viewing experience of One Afternoon is that while the painting’s perspective places the viewpoint slightly above the figure/ground, when the large canvas is hung on the wall, the viewer sees the scene simultaneously from an (imagined) hovering and a (physical) standing position. This disjuncture plays tricks on the viewer’s perception and requires one to work through the shifting perspectives, a process that adds a dose of intrigue and even unease to an otherwise mundane scene. The sense of unease is enhanced by Hayakawa’s depiction of the figure in an unusual pose, with only his back facing the viewer/artist. This pictorial choice implies either an intrusion on the man’s private moment on the part of the viewer/artist, or a refusal to be seen on the part of the subject. Unlike her earlier portraits or nudes, in which the models’ faces are at least visible (albeit with eyes averted), the anonymity in One Afternoon creates an added layer of tension in an image that seems simultaneously and paradoxically intimate and removed. In Search of Miki

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69 Miki Hayakawa, Portrait of Young Man, ca. 1929. Oil on canvas, 19 × 16 in.



That pictorial ambivalence may have reflected the artist’s personal relationship

with the subject, adding another dimension of significance, and mystery, to the painting. Hayakawa’s rendering of the man’s white shirt in One Afternoon is almost identical to that on the ukulele player, and both figures have distinctively broad and muscular forearms/elbows in sleeves rolled up in a specific and similar way. It looks like the same figure is also in Music, judging by the man’s profile, hairline, and facial features (albeit obscured in One Afternoon). The man appears in Worker as well, another undated canvas that has the same palette and painterly treatments of forms, contrasts, textures, and perspective (figure 70).54 Note, too, that the door in One Afternoon looks similar to the 118

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70 Miki Hayakawa, Worker (Boy Sawing), ca. 1936. Oil on canvas, 26 × 26 in.

one in Music, and the floors in both paintings and in Worker share the same hues. All four compositions share a clear diagonal slant from the upper left to the lower right. These clues suggest that One Afternoon and the other three paintings were probably produced in the same period, or at least during a time when Hayakawa was often with the young man in these images. Hayakawa’s friend Mateo Lettunich, who donated the ukulele painting to the Monterey Museum of Art, identified the man in it as “Edward.” Hayakawa and Edward were in a relationship and lived together, Lettunich recalled, but Edward left her. One might argue that Hayakawa deployed different pictorial strategies in the paintings of Edward to convey the stronger emotional investment that she may have had in their relationship. Gone was the straightforward presentation of the sitters, evident in the aforementioned nudes and the portrait of the African American man, whose poses indicate openness (even with gaze averted) to the artist and, by extension, the viewer. While the Edward images were created from a more intimate perspective, any sense of closeness is undercut by the inscrutability of the man, who is depicted as thoroughly self-absorbed and inaccessible, especially in One Afternoon. In Search of Miki

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To date, no evidence has surfaced to shed light on the state of Hayakawa’s rela-

tionship with Edward. But these visually different works that Hayakawa created during her residency in Pacific Grove suggest that the broader Monterey milieu, along with her romantic relationship, may have stimulated and steered her creativity in a somewhat different direction.55 Hayakawa’s involvement with Edward and the real extent of her contribution to the vibrant artistic and literary communities on the Monterey Peninsula await future research and discovery.56 Affirmation, Displacement, and Santa Fe Hayakawa was apparently satisfied with, and likely proud of, both One Afternoon and From My Window, which became her most exhibited works on many important occasions during the second half of the decade. As mentioned, One Afternoon made its debut in the 1932 SFAA show and went on to appear in the 1935 San Francisco Art Museum’s opening exhibition and then in the 1936 Los Angeles Museum of Art’s Painters and Sculptors of Southern California. From My Window was also in the 1935 opening exhibition in San Francisco and traveled to Los Angeles for the museum’s 1937 exhibition. In a photograph of her solo show at the same museum in November 1944, One Afternoon is front and center in the gallery display, reinforcing its importance to Hayakawa (figure 71).57 The painting appeared in another landmark event of Hayakawa’s career, the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939–40. Originally planned as a celebration of the completion of the Golden Gate and San Francisco–Oakland Bay bridges, the Exposition on Treasure Island expanded to become an international and eclectic spectacle of a plethora of engineering feats, technological advances, architectural innovations, and artistic achievements, with a special space dedicated to highlighting California artists and their work. Hayakawa made it into two art exhibitions at the exposition: From My Window was selected for the Exhibition of Works by California Artists in 1940, and Portrait was in the Golden Gate International Exposition Exhibition of Paintings in 1939.58

One cannot underestimate the professional and personal significance for Hayakawa

of being in this grand international affair. Certainly there were hundreds of other artists who also showed their works, including some of her CSFA teachers and colleagues, such as Spencer and Constance Macky, Oldfield, and others. But the exposition was a capstone honor to conclude the decade for an ambitious artist who, at age thirty-five, had appeared in more than two dozen exhibitions in fifteen years. It was also a personal affirmation of her choice to become an artist, after her father reportedly disapproved of her career choice: “My father objected . . . he wanted me to do important things. But the only thing I could do was painting, somehow,” Hayakawa recalled.59 To have earned a spot on a national team of celebrated American artists, in addition to having been an active and critically acclaimed member of various art groups since 1925, was no small feat for a young Japanese immigrant.

The exposition’s art exhibitions had another implicit but crucial political message

that relates to Hayakawa’s Japanese origin. As a showcase of a modern America’s 120

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and, more specifically, San Francisco’s creative, cultural, and racioethnic diversity, the exposition served as an antithesis of the racially motivated atrocities that the Axis countries were committing elsewhere in the world. The Nazis’ ethnic cleansing campaigns swept through Europe, obliterating peoples, cultures, and arts that they deemed degenerate or inferior. On the other side of the globe, Japan had been executing its imperial ambitions through its military’s brutal treatment of people of other ethnicities throughout Asia in the decade preceding the exposition. Hayakawa was by no means the only Japanese émigré artist in the exposition. Her friend Hisako Hibi, for instance, was also in the 1939 California art exhibition, and so were Obata, Sugimoto, and several Japanese photographers based in Los Angeles and San Francisco.60 Of course, the fact that these artists of Japanese descent could not become naturalized Americans due to the exclusionary laws and were still citizens of Japan was not mentioned in official exposition records; artists were identified by their cities of residence, not places of birth, in the published catalogues. Nevertheless, the exposition was promoted, against the backdrop of a world war fueled in part by the Axis countries’ zealous nationalism and racist fervor, as an international demonstration of American democracy offering freedom of expression for people of all different racial, cultural, and national origins.61 And for Hayakawa personally, to be one of many artists to represent contemporary American art—not to be confined to her birth or race—in a grand pageant of American exceptionalism no doubt helped affirm her status as a successful American artist.

It should be noted, however, that there are other unanswered questions concerning

Hayakawa’s participation in the Golden Gate International Exposition that point to

71 Miki Hayakawa’s solo exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art, 1944.

broader challenges confronting any researchers who attempt to reconstruct Hayakawa’s oeuvre. The exposition’s official catalogues list From My Window and Portrait, thus verifying that both paintings were shown.62 On the back frame of One Afternoon, there are also two submission labels for the exposition, one for each year. Based on the labels alone, one would think that Hayakawa had a total of three works in the exposition and submitted One Afternoon to the same big event twice, albeit for different art exhibitions. One Afternoon was given to the New Mexico Museum of Art in 1954 by Hayakawa’s husband “in memory of his wife,” who had died the year before, and thus appears to have reliable provenance records. However, the labels look to have been filled out by different hands: for example, the “y” in Hayakawa’s last name, as well as the i’s, o’s, and g’s, are formed differently.63 While there are various circumstances under which Hayakawa or someone else could have completed the submission forms, the absence of the painting from the numerous official catalogues in either 1939 or 1940—and there were ten or more publications associated with the exposition—is puzzling.64 In Search of Miki

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Could it be that Hayakawa intended to submit One Afternoon to the exposition’s art

exhibitions both years but decided not to? Or that she did submit it, but the painting was somehow omitted from the actual displays or the official publications? If One Afternoon was never in the 1939–40 exhibitions, why would the frame have the official tags, and for both years? Since the painting stayed in the hands of Hayakawa and Preston McCrossen and never entered the marketplace, there does not seem to have been any opportunity or reason for anyone to affix fake labels to the work to increase its value. How, then, can the discrepancy between the labels and the absence of One Afternoon from the exposition’s records be explained?

The painting’s labels raise another question that also concerns Portrait of a Negro.

The address 111 3rd Street, Pacific Grove, appears in all three labels on One Afternoon. Pacific Grove is the same city of residence that Hayakawa used in most of the Oakland Art Gallery submission forms on the backs of her known portraits, including LACMA’s Portrait of a Negro.65 On the portrait’s original label, the Pacific Grove location was also listed where one’s permanent address would appear, but the return address was given as 321 Chestnut Street, San Francisco.66 While these documents establish the connections between the paintings and their appearances in the Oakland Art Gallery / Oakland Art League annual shows, they do not help in dating the works because the titles are mostly “Portrait,” or at best “Portrait of Young Man,” making it difficult to correctly match them with published Oakland exhibition records.

Existing biographies claim that Hayakawa lived in Pacific Grove from 1937 to 1940

or, more broadly, in the late 1930s. The Monterey Public Library’s file dates her move to the Peninsula in 1933.67 But if Hayakawa relocated to Pacific Grove in the early 1930s, the label on Portrait of a Negro would mean that Hayakawa sent it to Oakland four or more years after its creation in 1926. But, according to the Oakland Art Gallery annual exhibition catalogues, Hayakawa showed only two works between 1933 and 1940: Portrait in 1933 and Tulips in 1937. Alternatively, if Hayakawa was submitting her freshly finished portrait to the annual exhibition, say, within a couple of years of its completion, that would mean that she somehow already had a Pacific Grove address serving as her “permanent residence” before 1930. This would call into question the information offered by the existing biographies.

All these inconsistencies may seem trivial or irrelevant to a casual viewer. But for

a researcher attempting to reconstruct an accurate chronology of Hayakawa, the lack of verifiable or consistent documentation to ascertain a painting’s date is a hindrance to grasping the extent of the artist’s oeuvre vis-à-vis her stylistic development and creative milieu. It also affects a researcher’s ability to determine when and how Hayakawa ended up in Santa Fe in order to understand the impact of U.S. post–Pearl Harbor policies on someone like her.

It appears that neither Hayakawa nor her local friends and colleagues let the

anti-Japanese hysteria stop her from becoming an active member of the Santa Fe art circles, though. Based on what I have been able to gather thus far, just as she had fully contributed to the burgeoning California modernism, Hayakawa engaged the Santa Fe artistic community in earnest soon after her relocation. The earliest printed 122

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72 Miki Hayakawa, Cristo Rey Church, ca. 1944. Oil on canvas, 17 × 26 in.

records that I have obtained about her local activity are of a 1943 exhibition in one of the New Mexico Museum of Art’s alcoves that displayed works by Hayakawa, Preston McCrossen, Teresa Bakos, and Charles Barrows, as well as the Thirtieth Annual Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors of the Southwest, which took place earlier in the same year. Her submission to the earlier show, again, was One Afternoon.68 She exhibited with McCrossen at the museum every year (1943–48), along with a coterie of artist friends who formed the “Fiesta Group” (1944–51), and sold several paintings over the years, according to reports in El Palacio.69 And, continuing to earn acclaim, Hayakawa’s oil portrait Angie won a top prize at the Albuquerque State Fair in September 1952.70

A few more paintings and drawings created by Hayakawa that have resurfaced

over the years offer glimpses of Hayakawa’s artistic and personal connections with the community of Santa Fe since her relocation to New Mexico. She produced many landscapes and reportedly went on regular painting trips with McCrossen and artist Foster Jewell.71 One painting, Cristo Rey Church (ca. 1944), exemplifies Hayakawa’s response to the natural beauty of Santa Fe, which has also inspired many other American artists (figure 72). Surrounding the adobe church with feathery plants and trees, against a backdrop of undulating hills that extend into the distance, the painting recalls the juxtapositions and contrasts that Hayakawa used in From My Window. But instead of being confined to a city view framed by the window, she painted Cristo Rey Church from being within the expansive nature. Hayakawa modulated variations of earth tones to capture the warmth of the clay/sand surfaces, the subdued lights reflecting off the buildings, and the thin and crisp air, as manifested in her soft brushstrokes, which bring everything into a coherent composition. The immersive viewpoint in Cristo Rey Church suggests a full physical presence in the landscape and by extension, perhaps, a full embrace of her new home. In Search of Miki

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73 William Ford, Miki, 1944. Oil on canvas board, 20 × 16 in.



By all accounts, Hayakawa was not only a respected artist, but also a beloved friend

to many in Santa Fe. Bernique Longley, an artist who arrived in Santa Fe in 1946, fondly recalled that Hayakawa and McCrossen were the first people she met, and Hayakawa was “warm, vivacious,” and a “tiny, attractive woman who consistently went out of her way” to welcome new artists in town. Longley thought Hayakawa was a “very serious artist” who neither considered her work “precious” nor had a big ego. To keep learning and to maintain the creative camaraderie, Hayakawa organized weekly sketching classes, attended by several local artists who pitched in to pay for the models, and she would serve hot chocolate after their sessions, Longley reminisced.72 Among the regulars 124

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was Hayakawa’s close friend William “Bill” Ford (1920–2009), who corroborated Longley’s recollections: Hayakawa “was an excellent artist and an excellent cook,” Ford told a reporter, and most of all a “gracious person . . . naïve yet knowing, and we all loved her.”73

A pair of portraits vividly illustrates both

Ford’s and Longley’s descriptions of Hayakawa, as well as Hayakawa’s close friendships with her compatriots in Santa Fe. In an oil portrait by Ford, Miki (1944), Hayakawa is a slight but spirited woman with an oversized palette by her side and a bunch of her hair flying freely (figure 73). Through quick, rough brushstrokes, Ford conveys and makes vivid her dedication to painting. This dynamic portrayal of Hayakawa is the opposite of the portrait of Ford painted by Hayakawa in 1947 (figure 74). Rendered through the meticulous shading and gradation that she had developed in her oil-painting repertoire, Hayakawa’s Ford is sensitive and pristine both in terms of the portrait’s formal quality and in her representation of the twentyseven-year-old man. Whereas Hayakawa, in Ford’s depiction, is animated and self-absorbed, in Hayakawa’s depiction Ford is proper and relaxed, and his ethereal appearance is enhanced by his crystal-clear blue eyes. Like the man in Portrait of a Negro, Ford’s face has the luminosity that had become a signature quality in Hayakawa’s portraiture

74 Miki Hayakawa, William Ford, 1947.

and figurative paintings. Although, like the African American man, Ford is shown in three-quarter profile, he differs in his gaze, which directly engages the artist/viewer. The revealing gleam in Ford’s eyes, and his frank, rosy face, suggest that Hayakawa had become more open in her approach to portraiture. Gone is the sense of detachment exhibited by her earlier, contemplative figures. Instead, she appears to allow herself and, by extension, the viewer to enter the direct contact zone that the model’s gaze creates, adding a greater degree of connection and intimacy with the model.74

Finding a new home did not mean that Hayakawa left behind her ties with

California or an astute awareness of her diasporic identity. Despite her wartime displacement and relocation, Hayakawa maintained her status as an “active member in good standing” in the San Francisco Art Association between 1942 and 1945.75 In 1946, she reportedly exhibited her works at Kober’s Book Store in Denver, Colorado, a show hosted by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). The league, with chapters in cities throughout the United States, advocated for Japanese Americans’ civil rights and lobbied for changes in laws that discriminated against Japanese Americans in In Search of Miki

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the exclusion era. The league’s newspaper, Pacific Citizen, made a point of stating that Hayakawa, who had been painting and exhibiting since the mid-1920s, was an accomplished artist of Japanese descent who deserved the community’s attention.76 How and why Hayakawa chose to stage a display of her artwork in a bookstore some 350 miles away from her home in Santa Fe remains unknown. The JACL show does indicate, though, that she maintained her contact with other groups and people of Japanese descent while living among predominantly non-Japanese friends and colleagues in Santa Fe—another prominent Issei (first-generation Japanese) artist living in New Mexico was Chuzo Tomatzu, whose wife, incidentally, was the sister of Hideo Noda’s wife.77 As a continuation of her prewar engagement with other artists of Japanese/ Asian descent through organizations such as the Japanese Artists Association and the Oriental Art Exhibit group, Hayakawa’s postwar interaction with an advocacy group like JACL suggests a recognition of her racial identity and its wartime (and postwar) ramifications.

Indeed, a short but telling letter that Hayakawa wrote in the middle of World War

II points to her awareness of the vexed position she was in. In an inquiry sent to the SFAA about her eligibility for the Albert M. Bender grant-in-aid competition in 1943, Hayakawa wrote, “I am not a citizen because I was born in Japan, but I have been in California over twenty-five years, arriving when I was seven. I had to leave California because of evacuation orders. . . . I held the Virgil Williams and Anne Bremer scholarships at the California School of Fine Arts at San Francisco, and one earlier at Berkeley Arts and Crafts. I belong to the San Francisco Art Association.”78 The matter-of-fact tone of the concise letter belies the challenging circumstances in which Hayakawa and many U.S. residents of Japanese descent were placed. Hayakawa foregrounded her long residency in the country and her accomplishments as an American artist, while simultaneously acknowledging, albeit understatedly, the history of exclusionary laws that prevented her from becoming a naturalized citizen. Saying “I belong to the San Francisco Art Association,” in the present tense, in 1943, clearly was meant to help certify her eligibility for the grant.79 But the statement also served to proclaim her sense of identity as an artist with a “home,” as someone who belonged to a group, even if her physical connection had been rendered tenuous in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. The ostensibly straightforward explanation “I had to leave California because of evacuation orders” moderated the actual trauma of being forced to move away from her longtime home under wartime policies.

Just as the Hayakawa-Gee companion pieces foreground San Francisco’s multi-

ethnic and multicultural milieu, the Hayakawa-Ford portraits also point to the people of divergent racial and cultural backgrounds in Santa Fe with whom Hayakawa built a productive life. The Santa Fe paintings—including some unverified portraits of African Americans and people who look to be Latino/Latina or Native American— thus serve as promising leads for future research that I hope will reveal the real-life stories of Hayakawa and many other understudied artists and lead to rediscovery of their artworks.

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Epilogue Concerning Exclusion

Writing in 1937 as president of Artists’ Union, artist Harry Gottlieb (1895–1992) opened his statement for the ACA Gallery’s Paintings by New York Chinese-Japanese Artists by registering an unequivocal protest against the recent layoffs of thousands of artists from the Works Progress Administration: “The provision of the Relief Appropriation Bill which brought about the dismissal of 500,000 needy workers from the WPA was an attack on the living standards of the American people.” The provision stipulated that the federally sponsored public works projects could hire only U.S. citizens, resulting in émigré artists losing the main source of their income as employees of the WPA, which had been employing artists since 1935. Targeting foreigners, including those who had been active in the United States for decades but were ineligible for American citizenship, essentially amounted to “group discrimination,” wrote Gottlieb; it was the xenophobic forces’ “most reprehensible form” of reaction in the name of protecting Americans’ economic interest. As contributive and integral members of American culture, these émigré artists had a vital and deserved place in America. “Their dismissal not only deprives the country of their talent but in effect denies their right to be artists. . . . The W.P.A. art projects represent a landmark in the development of a democratic culture for America. Thanks to the W.P.A. millions of people realize today that cultural enjoyment is not only for the few in the upper classes; culture has become part of that urge for a fuller and a better life.”1 Gottlieb’s words are worth reproducing at length here because they encapsulate American progressive artists’ views on art’s place in society with a brevity that belies the layers of ideological complexity underlying his protest. By framing artistic production as a critical means of providing all Americans access to the fine arts and thus elevating their quality of life, Gottlieb, a lifelong Marxist and Communist Party member, made a case for the government’s continuing employment of artists (in the form of the WPA) as a democratic obligation. That is, artists, native or foreign born, have much to contribute, and excluding a potentially valuable workforce, based on discriminatory categories, would only weaken the infrastructure of American democracy.

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The last sentences in Gottlieb’s statement deftly transcend and shift the focus of a

nativism debate to a demand for the highest quality of art, regardless of its producer: “[Americans] have a right to expect from the art projects the best work available, irrespective of race, color or creed. The Artists’ Union of New York, one of the sponsors of this exhibition, calls upon all progressive forces to sponsor legislation that will put an end to such despicable discrimination.” Reiterating the “right” of Americans to enjoy the fine arts, Gottlieb argued that the government could ensure the “best” quality of art by focusing on the merit of the work itself, not on the artists’ ethno-racial identifiers or denominations. Decrying the economically driven but xenophobic exclusion that confronted diasporic Chinese and Japanese artists, Gottlieb also recognized progressives’ responsibility to effect change not simply in the realm of art but also in politics. He thus urged that it is not enough to protest on paper (or canvas) in hopes of eradicating discrimination and racism; artists must get involved in political battles to change the laws—one of the core characteristics of the American social realist movement.

It could be argued that Gottlieb spoke out against the dismissal of non–U.S.

citizens not only in his role as the union’s president, but also out of his intimate understanding of being in diaspora and in a racial-ethno (and religious) minority. For he was himself an immigrant, having relocated at the age of twelve with his Jewish parents from Romania to the United States in 1907.2 His exhibition statement can be regarded as a multivalent call to action based on both his ideological and his political conviction, as well as a proclamation of solidarity and alliance informed by his personal identification with other émigré artists and their plight. It was also a gesture of support for his longtime colleagues: Gottlieb and Ishigaki were fellow exhibitors in the Salon of Independent Artists shows throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, for instance; and Ishigaki and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953), another prominent artist of Japanese descent in artist groups with which Gottlieb was associated, were among the many artists who exhibited in Paintings by New York Chinese-Japanese Artists.3

Such a transracial alliance reflects the progressive zeitgeist of Gottlieb’s time, as

his was only one of numerous articulations of the entanglement of art, national identity, and racioethnic politics that circulated in the interwar American artistic milieu in which the artists in The Other American Moderns worked. Art historian Meyer Schapiro and artist Lynd Ward, for instance, both rejected the notion of “racial art” or using race (and place of birth) as a legitimate criterion in evaluating an artist’s work and qualifications as an “American” artist. Using as an example nineteenth-century French artists, Schapiro insisted, “What unites these artists stylistically is the common culture in which they grew up and produced their art.” The same holds true for American artists, the subject of his discussion. Ward stated that neither an artist’s “blood” (race) nor geography (country of origin) determines his or her art’s character or quality; it is instead “a combination of forces in the cultural environment and the social situation in which he finds himself” that shapes the kind of work that an American artist creates.4 Both Schapiro and Ward had geopolitics in mind, as they aimed to dispel the myth of “racial purity,” one of the major tenets of Nazism. But their assertions point to a progressive recognition: art and race are always ideological and political. 128

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Their proposals for how to interrogate the oft-fraught intersection of the two differed, in varying degrees, from those of influential African American thinkers. W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, proclaimed that African Americans were endowed with a ability (and “genius”) for the creation, preservation, and realization of beauty that would elevate their status to “full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens” and help combat the injustice confronting the disenfranchised “black folk.” Alain Locke, with his pronouncement of the “New Negro,” encouraged black artists to acknowledge and embrace their African heritage (and its prominent influence in modern art) while expressing their African American experience through the visual arts, writing, and music.5 A common thread in all these sometimes conflicting positions was that they sought to foster an inclusive American culture that embraced both endogenous and exogenous influences, as well as their divergences or incongruences. There was, in other words, an ostensibly utopian belief in art’s universality, which could transcend artists’ national, racial, and cultural differences and, in turn, constitute a richly heterogeneous American art.

It was a utopian vision, indeed, as this rhetoric of universalism failed to articu-

late individualized challenges confronting disparate minority communities or effect broader cultural and sociopolitical amelioration. In the eight decades since Gottlieb’s proclamation, race and its politics have remained one of the core contentious issues in American art, continuing to ignite firestorms of passionate debate, as seen in the controversies surrounding some high-profile exhibitions, including Advancing American Art (1947); Harlem on My Mind (1969); The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (1991); and the Whitney Biennials in 1993 and 2014, to mention only a few well-studied examples among many others. Legislative battles and actions that created discrepant or unfair policies disenfranchising racial minorities relegated artists in those communities and their works to the margins (or beyond the radar) of the American artistic establishment. Liberal institutions, patrons, and artist colleagues also held biases, despite their good intentions, that perpetuated the longstanding invisibility, or even erasure, of many minority artists, including, in the context of this study, American artists of Asian descent. As I hope the preceding chapters have demonstrated, while the artists in this book were active, award-winning, and some even prominent members of art circles on both U.S. coasts, their works have been not been substantively recognized, not to mention pursued and collected, by major American art museums (with the rare exception of the Hayakawa-Gee-Oldfield portraits, owned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Several veteran museum curators have admitted that while they are generally interested in works by artists such as Hayakawa, Ishigaki, and Noda, the lack of name recognition (or substantial research), coupled with a pervasive lack of funding among museums, would make it difficult to convince the museums’ acquisition committees or boards of trustees to purchase works by these “unknown” and “minor” artists.6

However, the deaccessioning of these artists’ works often faces little to no signif-

icant resistance or objection. In the case of the American-born Noda, for example, his painting Street Scene (1934), shown in the 1934 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Epilogue

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75 Photo of Hideo Noda’s School Life (Piedmont High School mural) as restored and reassembled in the grand hall of Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Kumamoto, Japan.

American Painting and acquired by the Whitney as part of its selection of top works, was deaccessioned in 1954 and is now in a Japanese collection. His sole surviving mural, School Life, at Piedmont High School in California (figure 76), was determined to be “surplus property” by the board of trustees of the Piedmont Unified School District, who did not wish to continue to maintain and preserve the mural. To prevent further deterioration of the fresco panels, district superintendent Gail G. Anderson wrote, the board decided to make the entire mural (main section: 8 ft 11.5 in. × 45 in.; two side sections: 18.5 × 52.5 in. each) available for sale in 1989, with a starting bid of ninety thousand dollars. A Japanese collector and Noda aficionado, Seiichirō Kuboshima, purchased the mural in 1990, and the Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art later acquired it from Kuboshima. Now the mural, extensively restored by the Japanese museum, stands in the museum’s grand hall, some 5,670 miles across the Pacific Ocean from its American origin.7 At least the board wisely put the proceeds from the sale to good use, and honored Noda’s legacy in his native California, by establishing the Noda Fund, from which the earned interest goes toward grants supporting visual arts in grades 6–12.8 But the dismantling and exportation of the mural—an ambitious “follow-up” work that illustrates the talent and skills recognized by those who commissioned Noda to design the (abandoned) Ellis Island mural in 1934—left little of the artist’s work in the United States, save for a rare few smaller works in the hands of private collections and small museums.9

The Other American Moderns is thus admittedly in part an “activist” project (it is not

“revisionist” because there exists little to be revised about these artists). I embarked on this project out of a genuine interest in knowing more about these understudied but 130

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provocative images by artists whose names recurred over the years as I was working on my book on Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s visual production vis-à-vis his grappling with his dual status as an American artist and an “enemy alien” during World War II. The difficulty I encountered in discovering and comprehending the extent of these artists’ oeuvres only affirmed my self-imposed mission of reintroducing them—through delimited and object-oriented analyses instead of biographical sketches—into the discourse on early twentieth-century American art. One could argue that my efforts are a continuation, eighty years later, of Gottlieb’s impassioned call against those nativist and racial biases that excluded certain groups of artists from the WPA and would exclude them from the mainstream history of modern American art. By revisiting and foregrounding these diasporic artists’ work, I recognize the imagery of the Other by the Other in the exclusion era of U.S. history as a form of cultural and sociopolitical critique of a society struggling to meet its democratic ideals of racial and economic equality. Such imagery also points to cross-racial alliances and negotiations that add critical nuance to the existing history of an American art that was, in reality, more diverse and multicultural thanks to these cosmopolitan contributors. The Other American Moderns may help, in a modest way, to encourage scholars and curators to investigate and unearth more fascinating artwork by historically overlooked minority artists, rather than producing even more dissertations and exhibitions on the “big-name white male artists.”

On a personal note, at some point in the decade of research punctuated by some

relatives’ and friends’ unexpected passing, I realized that I had an ulterior motive impelled by one word: “posterity.” A brain tumor took Noda’s life when he was only thirty-one years old. Matsura died from tuberculosis before he turned forty. Hayakawa lost her battle with cancer when she had barely reached fifty. And although he lived to be sixty-five, Ishigaki returned to Japan in 1952 having left no artwork in the United States, and essentially disappeared into obscurity as far as American art history is concerned. None of these artists had any known direct descendants. Having spent an immeasurable amount of time studying them and their work, I feel a sense of obligation—as an art historian, an immigrant, and a son of two lifelong artists who continue to paint with passion on a daily basis—to contribute to the preservation of these artists’ legacies within the art-historical narratives of modern America, their (adopted) home. It is also heartening to learn, through this arduous rediscovery process, about the quixotic persistence of a small group of passionate collectors in the United States and Japan, such as Michael D. Brown, Richard Sakai, and Seiichirō Kuboshima, who have for years noticed, purchased, and cherished artworks by Noda and Hayakawa; and to know that Ishigaki’s and Matsura’s works are preserved and appreciated in their respective native and adopted hometowns. Joining in their efforts, The Other American Moderns is thus my contribution and homage of sorts to these trailblazing artists.

Epilogue

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Gee is more recognizable thanks in large part to exhibitions and books that have appeared in the past decade or so, including art historian Anthony W. Lee’s seminal studies of Gee’s work and life, Yun Gee and Picturing Chinatown. Other U.S. publications that either focus on aspects of Gee’s oeuvre or mention Gee include Brodsky, Experiences of Passage; Kao, “Chinese Artists in the United States”; Spain, “Gee, Yun (Zhu Yuanzhi)”; and Fort, “An International Modernist.” The Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan published an exhibition catalogue, The Art of Yun Gee (1992), containing many of Gee’s works that later fetched impressive prices in various auctions in Asia in the past two decades. 2. Hughes, Artists in California; Brown, Views from Asian California; Kovinick and Yoshiki-Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West; and Chang et al., Asian American Art. 3. For seminal studies on visual artists’ efforts on fighting fascism in the 1930s, see Whiting, Antifascism in American Art; and Williams, Artists Against War and Fascism. 4. Roe, Frank Matsura; Roe, Shashinshū Furontia No Zan’ei. 5. Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 47–73; and Wolf, Asian American Art, 90–93. Ramona Handel-Bajema’s ambitious dissertation,

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“Art Across Borders,” is another work that gives the art of Ishigaki and Noda some deserved critical attention. 6. Matsura, for example, is certainly not forgotten in Okanogan. His photographs, enlarged to mural size, appear on the walls of buildings throughout the town. The Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama, Japan, staged an Ishigaki retrospective in 2013 to commemorate the 120th anniversary of his birth (on display from September 3 to October 25, 2013), the first showing of Ishigaki’s works in sixteen years, since the same museum organized Japan in America: Eitarō Ishigaki and Other Japanese Artists in the Pre–World War II United States in 1997; Noda was included in that exhibition as well. But he received a centennial treatment in a retrospective organized by Twin Art Gallery (now Mizoe Art Gallery) in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2008. Hayakawa is the only artist in this group who has not received any substantial attention. 7. Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” 362, 365, and 367. 8. The Immigration Act of 1924, or JohnsonReed Act, was a U.S. federal law that established a quota system for immigration based on national origins. Adding to the existing Chinese exclusion laws (since 1882), the 1924 act excluded all Asians from eligibility for American citizenship.

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For detailed discussions of the harmful University, Kristin Harpster offered in and long-term impact of these exclusionher thesis, “Visions and Transgressions,” ary laws, see Makela, “The Immigration the most analytical study of Matsura’s Act of 1924”; and Ngai, “The Architecture pictures that was available during our of Race,” among many others. curatorial research in 2005. 9. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 6. Mimura, “A Dying West?” 222. 7. The biographical information I use here 10. Wolff, Resident Alien, 7. is drawn largely from Roe’s research 11. Miller, “‘Home’ and ‘Homeless.’” and a Matsura chronology in English, 12. Singal, “Towards a Definition of “Timeline for Sakae (Frank) Matsura,” American Modernism.” in Fitzgerald, Frank S. Matsura, 62–63, as well as a biography, written in Japanese, by Tatsuo Kurihara, A Man Named Frank Chapter 1 (partially translated by Lin-Dai Tsai and 1. The photograph is in Frank S. Matsura ShiPu Wang). Fitzgerald’s publication Photographs 1907–1913, Manuscripts, provides invaluable resources, including Archives, and Special Collections transcribed newspaper reports that I (MASC), Washington State University incorporated into this study. Libraries. Thanks to Mark O’English, 8. Roe, Frank Matsura, 20. University Archivist at MASC, for 9. Okanogan Record, July 1, 1904. helping me obtain study images and 10. In the Okanogan Record, April 14, 1905, high-resolution reproductions, and for the name appeared as “Frank Matsura,” hosting a visit to examine Matsura’s whereas in earlier reports in the same photographs and the William Compton newspaper it was spelled “Matsuura” Brown Papers, 1830–1963. or “Matssura.” Fitzgerald found the 2. I must acknowledge JoAnn Roe, as well first reference to Matsura by name in as Marilyn Moses and Richard Ries at the the Okanogan Record on June 10, 1904: Okanogan County Historical Society, for “Mr. and Mrs. E.F. Wehe made the best responding to my research inquiries. trout catch of the season last Sunday. . 3. See, among others, Solomon-Godeau, . . Frank, the Jap photographer, took a “The Legs of the Countess”; and picture of the string Monday which Mr. Apraxine and Demange, “La Divine Wehe has on display in his office.” Many Comtesse.” of the news articles are transcribed in 4. For more extensive studies of these artFitzgerald, Scrapbook, 50–51. ists’ work, see, among others, Machida, 11. According to Roe, who continued her “Out of Asia”; Lee, Ferguson, and research and contact with the Matsura Vicario, Projects; Lee and Goldberg, Parts; family in Japan after her original book Tseng Kwong Chi; Smith, Enacting Others. was published, the spelling with one “u” 5. Most of the earlier writing available in was said to be correct or more accurate in English focused on piecing together indicating Sakae’s status as “a member of Matsura’s biography and his varied the clan head family.” Author’s correspondence with JoAnn Roe, November 4, repertoire. JoAnn Roe, a Washington2014. Other scholars in Japanese studies based writer who has made great efforts thought that this distinction might be to uncover Matsura’s life story, wrote limited only to Frank Matsura’s case, as extensively about Matsura’s time in the practice of distinguishing the honke the Okanogan region. Her seminal (head branch) of a family by the presence works, among them Frank Matsura: or absence of a syllable was not a general Frontier Photographer, provide invaluable practice. It was a distinction that might sources for subsequent research. As a be more noticeable or prominent when master’s candidate at Washington State 134

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the name was spoken, though. In other words, both spellings are correct. My thanks to Roe, Dr. Alicia Volk, and Dr. Yui Suzuki for offering their insights. 12. Okanogan Record, January 5, 1906. 13. Roe, Frank Matsura, 15. 14. Studies of the Meiji Restoration are numerous. See, among many others, Beasley, The Meiji Restoration; Wilson, Patriots and Redeemers in Japan; Jansen, The Emergence of Meiji Japan; and Cohen, “The Political Process.” 15. Kurihara, A Man Named Frank, 43–47. I use one of several possible English transliterations of Okami’s first name here. As the pronunciation of one’s name can vary in Japanese, even though the Kanji character appears to be the same, 正 can also be pronounced as “Tadashi,” “Sho,” and so on. 16. After earning his teaching credentials and certificate, Okami became a lecturer and eventually the principal of the Shōei Elementary School (1886–1907), where a twenty-year-old Matsura taught at the Sunday school and from 1893 to 1896 assisted in administrative work. Okami also taught at the Shōei Girls’ Junior and Senior High School and other schools for several years. Ibid., 61. 17. Neal Sobania, “Hope and Japan: Early Ties,” Hope College Alumni Newspaper, December 1998. 18. Kurihara, A Man Named Frank, 60–68. The first large-scale retrospective of Shimooka’s photography was organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and was on display from March to May 2014. For Shimooka’s work and life, see Ishiguro, Renjō Shimooka; and 328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers. 19. Several news stories about the RussoJapanese War appeared on the front page of the newspaper. A short article, entitled “Japan’s Equivocal Greatness,” even took care to quote Japan’s ambassador to France refuting Europeans’ perception of Japan as “uncivilized,” boasting, “We have recently killed some

70,000 Russians, and every European nation is wondering at the high condition of civilization which we have attained.” Okanogan Record, March 31, 1905. 20. Okanogan Record, April 14 and May 12, 1905. 21. Okanogan Record, March 1, 1907. 22. Okanogan Record, June 20, 1913. 23. Okanogan Independent, June 20, 1913. 24. Okanogan Independent, July 4, 1913. 25. Okanogan Record, June 20, 1913. 26. Roe, Frank Matsura, 21. For an online resource site maintained by the Colville Tribes, see http://www.colvilletribes​ .com/history_of_the_colvilles.php. 27. Morgan, introduction to Roe, Frank Matsura, 12. 28. Wilson, “The Life of a Working Girl,” 22. 29. For an account of the irrigation project, see Yates, A Pioneer Project. 30. Frank S. Matsura Photographs 1907–1913, Negative 35-22-05. Established by the Pacific Fur Company in 1811, Fort Okanogan was the first American trade outpost in the state of Washington. For relevant local history, see Brown, Early Okanogan History. 31. See, for example, Negatives 35-12-27 and 35-08-83, among many others, in Frank S. Matsura Photographs 1907–1913. 32. The typed guide for Brown’s scrapbooks, box 23, William Compton Brown Papers 1830–1963. 33. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 6. 34. Sapir, “The Impossible Photograph.” 35. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 7. 36. Ibid., 7–8. 37. Frank S. Matsura Collection PC-35, Negative 70-03-23. 38. For more on Chief Joseph, see, among others, Young, “An Indian’s Views of Indian Affairs”; McCoy, Chief Joseph, Yellow Wolf; and Guthrie, “Good Words.” 39. Mimura, “A Dying West?,” 693. 40. Studies of Curtis’s work are numerous, including Lyman, The Vanishing Race; Graybill, Edward Sheriff Curtis; Gidley, Edward S. Curtis; Cardozo and Horse Capture, Sacred Legacy. Notes to Pages 13–22

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41. For a history of the Seattle Camera Club and its members, see Martin and Bromberg, Shadows of a Fleeting World. My thanks to both authors for answering my inquiries on whether or not Matsura might have had any connection with the Seattle Camera Club—their extensive research shows no evidence of Matsura’s having any contact with the club. For the history and analyses of Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession, see Doty and Newhall, Photo Secession; Homer and Johnson, Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession, 1902; and Bochner, An American Lens, among others. For a survey of pictorialism in photography elsewhere in the United States, see Cutshaw and Sichel, California Dreamin’. 42. Photogravure is a process of transferring an image from a film negative to a metal plate. The image is etched into the plate, from which reproductions are made. For a concise explanation of photogravure, see Morrish and MacCallum, Copper Plate Photogravure. 43. Mimura, “A Dying West?,” 704. 44. Ibid., 701–2. 45. Green, “Rosebuds of the Plateau.” 46. Mimura, “A Dying West?,” 688. 47. Ibid., 701. 48. Ibid., 688 and 714. 49. Moorhouse’s untitled young female portrait is in the Moorhouse (Major Lee) Photographs Collection, University of Oregon Libraries Special Collections and University Archives, PH036_4891. 50. Moorhouse’s image is in the Special Collections and University Archives of University of Oregon Libraries, PH036_2308. 51. Glass, “A Cannibal in the Archive.” Among the studies that Glass references, see especially Brown and Peers (with members of the Kainai Nation), “Pictures Bring Us Messages.” 52. Moorhouse, Souvenir Album. For Moorhouse’s projects and relationships with Native Americans, see Grafe, “The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse,” in People of the Plateau, 29–40. 136

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53. Tirzah Trask Umpqua Tribe, Special Collections and University Archives of University of Oregon Libraries, PH036_4010. 54. Green, “Rosebuds of the Plateau,” 51–52. 55. Harpster, “Visions and Transgressions,” 107. Harpster interviewed Tim Brooks of the Colville Reservation Museum (October 3, 1998), who offered his grandmothers’ recollections of Frank Matsura: “Colville Indians called Matsura the ‘photo man.’” Harpster asked how Matsura negotiated control of the posing and performing evident in his photos: “Mr. Brooks had heard that Indians were pleased that Matsura was preserving their history by recording them not only in their tribal dress (which he said they voluntarily wore to his studio), but also while wearing workclothes. They thought he captured a changing time by photographing them in settings that reflected the move away from teepees and into frame homes. Apparently, they felt that Matsura’s photographs would make viewers realize the changes occurring on the Colville Reservation. Mr. Brooks said further that they thought Matsura took funny photographs. . . . They liked him, though, so in Mr. Brooks’s words, ‘they went along with it.’” 56. My statement concerns this specific published image by Curtis, however. As Glass has shown in his essay, in a different version of the same figure, the Hamat’sa shaman looks straight at Curtis’s camera. That gaze would force the viewer to consider the image-making process and in turn the confrontation between the camera and the shaman—a realization of the Native person’s existence in a contemporary sense that may not have been desirable for Curtis’s pictorial narrative. Glass, “A Cannibal in the Archive,” 131. 57. Frank S. Matsura Collection PC-35, Negatives 35-01-29, 35-01-35, 35-01-36, and 35-01-38. 58. Roe, Frank Matsura, 17. 59. Frank S. Matsura Collection PC-35, Negatives 35-01-09 and 35-01-40. Matsura

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was said to have once given Bessie Misel a “hemstitched silk handkerchief” made by his aunt in Japan, and Misel “wore it out using it as a scarf.” Misel also kept a photo album that Matsura gifted her. Wilson, “The Life of a Working Girl,” 24. 60. For studies of frontier women’s many roles and histories, see Riley, The Female Frontier; and her follow-up book, Confronting Race, which deals with cross-racial relations/relationships. 61. For Boag’s extensive and fascinating studies, see “Go West Young Man, Go East Young Woman”; Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past; and Same Sex Affairs. My thanks to Cheryl Gunselman, Manuscript Librarian at Washington State University–Pullman, for pointing me to Boag’s research. 62. Frank S. Matsura Photographs 1907–1913, Negatives 35-04-07 and 35-04-01. 63. Frank Matssura [sic], “Education of the Japanese Women,” Okanogan Record, March 31, 1905. Incidentally, Matsura’s name was spelled with an extra “s,” as opposed to the additional “u” in the earlier spelling of his last name. 64. Washington State University records show that Timento was an aunt of Cecil Chiliwhist. The information associated with Matsura’s Cecil Chiliwhist and Her Aunt Pose at Matsura’s Studio, ca. 1910, shows that Cecil Chiliwhist was a Methow Indian who lived in the Malott area and ranched. The Methow lived on the Methow River, which enters the Columbia River in north-central Washington, and their population had been in steady decline, from a recorded eight hundred (including the Sinkiuse) in 1780 to three hundred in the early 1870s. Ruby and Brown, A Guide to the Indian Tribes, 129–30. 65. Thanks to Barry Friedman, a pioneer collector and dealer of Indian trade blankets, for taking the time to answer my inquiries and suggesting readings. Friedman’s Chasing Rainbows is considered an indispensable work in the study of American Indian blankets.

66. Lohrmann and Kapoun, Language of the Robe, 10–11. Rain Parrish, of Navajo descent, and Bob Block, of Osage descent, provide their personal experiences and understanding in the first chapter, “Native American Perspective on the Trade Blanket,” 1–5. Lohrmann points out that understanding the robe was deemed important enough for the Bureau of American Ethnology to compile and publish an extensive explanation of “the language of the robe” in 1905. 67. Okanogan Record, February 19, 1904; transcribed in Harpster, “Visions and Transgressions,” 89n15. 68. There is a wealth of literature on the contested history of the assimilation of Native Americans. For publications relevant to the period in which Matsura worked, see, for example, Prucha, Americanizing the American Indians; Tyler, A History of Indian Policy; Hoxie, A Final Promise; Wilkins and Lomawaima, Uneven Ground; Seaton and Bennett, Federal Indian Law. 69. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling,” 260. Pratt’s original paper was delivered at the National Conference on Social Welfare and reproduced in Garrett et al., The Indian Policy, 46–59. For more studies on the boarding schools and their impact, see also Adams, Education for Extinction, and Colmant, “U.S. and Canadian Boarding Schools,” among many others. 70. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling,” 260. 71. Ibid., 263. 72. Sheffer, The Romance of Race, 160. 73. For a detailed study of the complex and arbitrary racial and ethnic categorizations in legal terms that the U.S. government and lawmakers used to distinguish whites from nonwhites, see López, White by Law. 74. Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law,” 48–49. See also Pascoe, “Race, Gender, and Intercultural Relations”; and Pascoe, What Comes Naturally. 75. Encyclopedia of American Studies, s.v. “Miscegenation,” http://www.credoref​ Notes to Pages 31–36

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erence.com/entry/jhueas/miscegenation, accessed August 13, 2013. The literature on the history of miscegenation is extensive. See, among others, Hodes, Sex, Love, Race; and Lemire, “Miscegenation.” 76. Gillmer, “Crimes of Passion,” 401, 405. In note 47, Gillmer quotes the language of the legislature, Act of January 29, 1855, § 1, 1854–1855 Wash. Sess. Laws 33, 33, which is worth repeating here: “All marriages heretofore solemnized in this territory, where one of the parties to such marriage shall be a white person, and the other possessed of one-fourth or more negro blood, or more than one-half Indian blood, are hereby declared void.” The repeal was enacted by Act of January 23, 1868, § 1, 1867–1868 Wash. Sess. Laws 47, 47–48. 77. Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal.2d 711, 198 P.2d 17 (1948). The case, also known as Perez v. Moroney and Perez v. Lippold, involved Andrea Perez, a Mexican immigrant’s daughter, and Sylvester David, a son of African American migrants from the South, who fell in love in Los Angeles during World War II and were unable to marry because of California’s antimiscegenation law. See also Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law,” 61–63; and Robin A. Lenhardt, “Perez v. Sharp and the Limits of Loving.” 78. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 342. 79. Gillmer, “Crimes of Passion.” 80. In Roe’s original research, she encountered an elderly Caucasian woman who claimed to have had some sort of romance with Matsura. The relationship could not be verified, however. Author’s correspondence with Roe, November 4, 2014. Chapter 2 1. I must acknowledge Mr. Yasuhiko Okumura and Mr. Ichiro Okumora, curators at the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, for hosting my visit to examine all of Ishigaki’s works in the 138

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museum’s collection in 2005, and for providing invaluable documents, books, and images that made my research possible. Ishigaki and his wife, Ayako Ishigaki, returned to Japan with most of his artworks and gave some of them to the museum after the artist passed away. Taiji Ishigaki Memorial Hall in Wakayama, established by Ayako, also houses many works. 2. There is an extensive body of literature on social realism. Two seminal works are Shapiro, Social Realism, and Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism. Other recent publications include Anreus, Linden, and Weinberg, The Social and the Real; and Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism. 3. A few publications in Japan provide the main basis for my research on Ishigaki’s biography, including Yasugi, Japan in America; Japanese Artists Who Studied in U.S.A.; Ishigaki, A Painter of Love; and most important, Ishigaki’s autobiographical essays, “Amerika hōrō yonjūnen,” serially published in Chūō kōron in 1952. 4. Chang et al., Asian American Art, 338–39; Wolf, “The Tip of the Iceberg”; Koshiro, “Beyond an Alliance of Color”; Hemingway, Artists on the Left, 47–48, 62–63, and several places where Ishigaki’s name is mentioned within a list of artists. Ishigaki’s name appears in Langa, Radical Art, but only in a handful of places as part of a list. 5. For an extensive study of American artists’ activism and visual work against fascism, see Whiting, Antifascism in American Art. For a study of the John Reed Club and its history, see Harrison, “John Reed Club Artists.” 6. Melville Upton, “Wars Against War and Nazis: Eitarō Ishigaki’s Art on View at A.C.A. Gallery,” New York Sun, March 12, 1936; and Emily Genauer, “Ishigaki Show Reveals Skill: Pictures of American Scene Revel in Bold Colors,” New York WorldTelegram, March 14, 1936, and “Ishigaki at A.C.A.,” New York World-Telegram, May 11, 1940.

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7. Jacob Kainen, “Eitarō Ishigaki,” Daily Worker, March 18, 1936. For a selection of reports and articles in the Daily Worker, see Fighting Words. 8. Among the recently published work that investigates “Afro-Asian encounters,” see Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting; Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounters; Mullen, “Persisting Solidarities,” for a historical overview of the expressions of solidarity between African American and Asian American writers and intellectuals; McFerson, Blacks and Asians in America; and Ho and Mullen, Afro Asia. 9. “Bonus Army Drives 8 Reds from Ranks,” New York Times, June 28, 1932, 2. There is a substantial body of literature on the historical circumstances and the many sociopolitical complications surrounding the Bonus March. See, among others, Daniels, The Bonus March; Liebovich, Press Reaction; Dickson and Allen, The Bonus Army; and Ortiz, Beyond the Bonus March and GI Bill. 10. John W. Killigrew delineates the decisions behind, and process of, deploying military forces from the army’s perspective in “The Army and the Bonus Incident.” Reports filed on the day of the first clash, July 28, 1932, appeared in the New York Times the following day with provocative headlines: “Troops Drive Veterans from Capital; Fire Camps There and at Anacostia; 1 Killed, Scores Hurt in Day of Strife” and “Bombs and Sabres Win Capital Battle,” New York Times, July 29, 1932, 1. 11. Ishigaki was not known to be a religious person, although he did learn his English at a Christian church after he emigrated to California, as pointed out in Japanese Artists Who Studied in U.S.A., 184. 12. Jonathan Weinberg has offered provocative insights on the imagery of muscular male bodies in relation to the projection and negotiation of male desire in his studies,“I Want Muscle” and Male Desire. Thanks to Tom Wolf for reminding me of Weinberg’s work after reading

an earlier version of my article on Ishigaki. 13. Ishigaki, A Painter of Love, 140. 14. Japanese Artists Who Studied in U.S.A., 184–86; and Asano, “Ishigaki Eitarō — America’s Japanese Painter,” in Ishigaki Eitarō. Yasugi offers a very detailed chronology of Ishigaki’s life in Japan in America, 119–30. For a discussion of the oft-divisive issue of Asian diasporic nationalism among immigrant laborers in the early twentieth century, see Maeda, Chains of Babylon. 15. Maeda, Chains of Babylon, 36–37; Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, 32. Hyman Kublin offers a richly detailed biography of Katayama’s tumultuous journeys through the sociopolitical landscape in Asian Revolutionary. He notes that Ishigaki, being “deemed to be literarily gifted,” was chosen to edit Katayama’s autobiography (257n24). For an index of online versions of Katayama’s various writings, visit http://www.marx​ ists.org/archive/katayama/. 16. Ishigaki, “Memories of Sen Katayama,” Monthly Review of the Meiji Cultural Works (October 25, 1955); translation by Satoko Hata of Hata Language Services, Sherman Oaks, California. Ishigaki’s encounter with Katayama is also described in Japanese Artists Who Studied in U.S.A., 184. Mitziko Sawada devotes a good deal of attention to Katayama’s activities in her book on Japanese immigrants in urban America at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, Tokyo Life, New York Dreams. See especially chap. 6, “Go East, Young Man!” 17. David J. Hellwig provides historical studies of the relationships between these communities in “The Afro-American and the Immigrant.” Chapters from this dissertation were published as “Afro-American Reactions” and “Black Reactions.” 18. Ishigaki, “Sen Katayama and His Comrades,” from his “Forty Years Wandering in America” series, Chūō kōron Notes to Pages 42–47

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67, no. 14 (1952): 236. Translation by Tsai Lin-Dai and ShiPu Wang. 19. The San Francisco Art Institute (formerly the California School of Fine Arts) enrollment records indicate that Ishigaki was a student at least for a few months, from October to December 1914. San Francisco Art Institute Enrollment Records, California Asian American Artists Biographical Survey Records (SC0929). 20. For Sloan’s biography and works, see Coyle and Schiller, John Sloan’s New York; Loughery, John Sloan; Elzea, John Sloan’s Oil Paintings; and Sloan, John Sloan, 1871–1951, among others. 21. Town was a large canvas (136.0 × 186.3 cm) that was exhibited at the 10th Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1926. It was reportedly cut in half around 1929, and the left panel is now in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, and the right, at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, both in Japan. Yasugi, Japan in America, 22–23, 105. 22. Ishigaki’s solo shows took place on March 9–21, 1936, and May 6–18, 1940. Located at 1269 Madison Avenue in New York, the ACA Gallery was founded by Herman Baron and a few artists, including Ishigaki’s fellow Japanese émigré Yasuo Kuniyoshi, on August 16, 1932. Its main mission was to promote contemporary American artists’ work that could be considered socially engaged or at least socially conscious. For a history of the ACA Gallery, see Baron’s unpublished account, “History of the ACA Gallery,” ACA Galleries records, 1917–63. Archives of American Art. The digitized records are on the Archives’ website. 23. One of Albert Strunsky’s three daughters, Leonore Strunsky, married the famed lyricist Ira Gershwin. Morris Strunsky was also the younger brother of Anna Strunsky Walling (1879–1964), a writer and socialist activist who was a close friend of the young Jack London at the turn of the twentieth century. Boylan, Revolutionary Lives. Thanks to Robert 140

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Boyle, Gertrude Boyle’s great nephew, for correcting my error in spelling the Strunsky name in my earlier publication, “By Proxy of His Black Hero.” 24. Ishigaki, “73 Horatio Street,” Chūō kōron 70, no. 9 (1955), included in Yasugi, Japan in America, 112–13; translation by Satoko Hata. According to Ishigaki, she was a “star reporter” for the New York Daily News who became famous for her work on the Hall-Mills murder trial in 1926. The journalist in question might have been Grace Robinson, a wellknown crime writer in the 1920s. Grace Robinson papers, 1892–1991, Collection Number 06941, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. 25. Ishigaki lived at the 246 West 14th Street address from 1915 to 1932, when he and wife Ayako relocated to 28 East 14th Street and became artist Kuniyoshi’s neighbors. Yasugi, Japan in America, 119–30. 26. Cutler, “Joaquin Miller and the Social Circle.” The photograph of the Kannos performing Takeshi’s 1913 “vision drama” Creation Dawn aided my identification of Head of a Woman. Along with another shot of the same scene, the photographs are in the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, LC-B23167-10. Takeshi Kanno self-published The Passing of Joaquin and Fragments of Creation-Dawn (A Vision Drama) in 1913 and 1928. 27. “Again in Love with Japanese: Gertrude Boyle’s Family Call Her Insane; Married Eight Years Ago to Kanno, She Now Prefers Ishigaki,” Boston Daily Globe, March 28, 1915, 44. The Kannos were married in Seattle, Washington, in 1907; Washington had no miscegenation laws at the time. According to Ishigaki, Gertrude’s divorce request was rejected by the court in San Francisco. Ishigaki, “Mrs. Sanger and Ms. Smedley,” from “Forty Years Wandering in America,” Chūō kōron 67, no. 12 (1952): 249; translation by Lee Hao-Hsuan and ShiPu Wang.

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28. Ishigaki, “Sen Katayama and His Comrades,” 241; and Ishigaki, “Mrs. Sanger and Ms. Smedley,” 253. Ayako Ishigaki also talks about Sanger’s residency at this location in her biography of Eitarō Ishigaki, A Painter of Love, 16–20. Sanger wrote about her visit to Japan in “Margaret Sanger in Japan.” 29. Ishigaki, “Mrs. Sanger and Ms. Smedley,” 250–52; Ishigaki, A Painter of Love, 204–6; and Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley, 5–9. For other biographies of Smedley, see MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, among others. 30. Robinson, “Ishigaki, Ayako Tanaka (Haru Matsui).” Restless Wave was published in 1940 and again in 2004 as Restless Wave: My Life in Two Worlds, a Memoir, with an afterword by Yi-Chun Tricia Lin and Greg Robinson. 31. Ishigaki, Restless Wave (1940), 209. 32. Ibid., 216; Ishigaki, A Painter of Love, 140–41. 33. Ayako Ishigaki, “May our love live to eternity,” May 15, 1958, Joseph Kaplan papers, 1915–77, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 34. There are numerous studies on Bellows’s boxing images as critical commentaries on class, race, and gender. See, among others, Haywood, “George Bellows’ ‘Stag at Sharkey’s’”; Schreiber, “George Bellows’s Boxers in Print”; and Corbett, “Life in the Ring.” 35. The Whip was the title that Ishigaki used in his solo exhibition, Paintings by Ishigaki, at the ACA Gallery in New York from March 9–21, 1936. A small exhibition pamphlet, with a brief foreword by William Gropper, is in the Eitarō Ishigaki Archives, Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan. 36. Rutsubo Ishigaki (Eitarō’s pseudonym), “Review of the 9th Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists,” Japanese Times, March 11, 1925. The painting was exhibited at the Society of Independent Artists’ annual show in 1925.

37. Platt, Art and Politics, 90; Marquardt, “‘New Masses.’” 38. Ishigaki, A Painter of Love, 117. 39. Marquardt, “‘New Masses,’” 56. See Marquardt, Art and Journals. 40. Marquardt, “‘New Masses,’” 64–65. Ishigaki, A Painter of Love, 117, makes a special point of listing Gold’s efforts at encouraging literary and visual arts based on the artists’ actual experience as the labor class, as opposed to works created from a bourgeois perspective. 41. Bruno Jasieński, “Resolution on the Work of the New Masses in 1931,” Louis Lozowick Papers, 1898–1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Reel 5898. 42. Ibid., 2. 43. Marquardt, “New Masses,” 62. 44. Lozowick also incorporated the motif of menacing horsemen into his lithographs in the nineteen-thirties, as seen in Tear Gas (1934), Demonstration (1937), and Moors over Spain (The Moors Return) (1937). See Flint, The Prints of Louis Lozowick. 45. Jasieński, “Resolution,” 3. 46. “Draft Manifesto of John Reed Clubs,” New Masses, June 1932, 5–6. For more discussions of the club’s brief history and activities, see Harrison, “John Reed Club Artists.” 47. Marquardt, “‘New Masses,’” 69. 48. “First National Conference, May 29–30, 1932,” Louis Lozowick Papers, 1898–1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Reel 5898. Both Lozowick (international secretary) and Gropper were on the National Executive Board, and the New York representation also included writers Oakley Johnson (executive secretary), Whittaker Chambers, and Joseph Freeman—the last two from the editorial staff of New Masses. 49. Marquardt, “New Masses,” 71. 50. Louise Mitchell, “The Fight for Negro Liberation: Eitarō Ishigaki, Well Known Anti-Fascist Japanese Artist, Answers Slurs Against Murals in Harlem Court,” Daily Worker, April 5, 1938. Notes to Pages 50–60

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51. In Roger Daniels’s expansive study of the Bonus March, for instance, there is no mention of the participation of African American veterans. Dickson and Allen’s The Bonus Army: An American Epic is the rare study that devotes more attention to this particular aspect of the march, as noted by Stephen R. Ortiz in “Rethinking the Bonus March,” 276. 52. Francis, “Making History,” 143. For an extensive examination of Johnson’s work in relation to racial identity, see Francis, Making Race. 53. The cover image of The Bonus Army: An American Epic is a photograph that shows “defiant veterans celebrat[ing] their takeover of a roundhouse in Cleveland, where railroad officials and police tried to keep them from riding boxcars eastward.” A few black veterans stand side by side with white veterans, their arms raised. The Library of Congress holds many images documenting the Bonus March; see, for example, the photographs in the Theodor Horydczak Collection. 54. These are works that have been reproduced in several important studies of the antilynching art in the 1930s. See, for example, Marquardt, “‘New Masses’”; Langa, “Two Antilynching Art Exhibitions”; Heyd, “Jews Mirroring African Americans”; Vendryes, “Hanging on Their Walls”; and Park, Lynching and Antilynching. 55. Margaret Duroc, “Critique from the Left,” Art Front, January 1936. Note that it is unclear if the fighting man is white; Duroc’s assumption seems to be based on his skin color, which is lighter than that of the black figure. 56. Dorothy Calhoun, “A Visit to Scottsboro Mothers,” Daily Worker, March 9, 1936, 7. 57. See, among other important studies, Raiford, “The Consumption of Lynching Images.” 58. Harry Raymond, “The Siege of the Capital,” New Masses, July 1932, 11–12. New Masses had been reporting on various bonus-related demonstrations that took place throughout the nation since 1931. 142

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These include Gropper’s February 1931 double-page drawing (10–11); Hugo Gellert’s cover for the July 1931 issue; Gellert’s, Gropper’s, and Walter Quiet’s illustrations in the December 1931 issue; and Felix Morrow’s The Bonus Army on the first page of the August 1932 issue. 59. Roy Wilkins, “Up in Harlem Down in the Delta,” Crisis (October 1932): 119. Other marchers confirmed the desegregated camps in interviews with Dickson and Allen, The Bonus Army, 118. 60. The image reproduced in McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists, 111, is likely a study, given that its appearance suggests an oil painting. The difference in brushstrokes is more visible than in the photographs of Ishigaki’s murals in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. M. Sue Kendall identifies the armed figure as John Brown, and she points out that Ishigaki’s rendition alludes to Brown’s “violent side,” which had been omitted in other versions depicting the abolitionist. See Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism, 73–75. 61. These criticisms with similar descriptions appeared on April 1, 1938, in the New York World-Telegram, the New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Sun, and the Daily News, among others. 62. Mitchell, “The Fight for Negro Liberation,” 80. 63. Ibid., 79. Chapter 3 1. Patterson and Conrad, Scottsboro Boy, 14. 2. There are numerous studies of the Scottsboro trials and their lasting ramifications. See, for instance, Miller, Pennybacker, and Rosenhaft, “Mother Ada Wright”; Sorensen, The Scottsboro Boys Trial; Weiner, “Black, White, and Red”; and Aretha, The Trial of the Scottsboro Boys. A few more will be cited later in the chapter. 3. The biography was written by Earl Conrad, who was an author dedicated to writing about African American lives and

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race relations. In addition to Patterson’s biography, Conrad published books such as Jim Crow America (1947), The Invention of the Negro (1967), and Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy (1970). Obituary, “Earl Conrad, 79, the Author Of Books on Race Relations,” New York Times, January 21, 1986. His papers are housed in the Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon Libraries. Some of the Scottsboro Boys were able to author, or cowrite, accounts of their arduous struggles for justice. In addition to Patterson, Clarence Norris, who outlived the other eight and died at age seventysix on January 23, 1989, wrote, with the help of Sybil D. Washington, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys. 4. “Jail Head Asks Troops as Mob Seeks Negroes,” New York Times, March 26, 1931, 21. 5. Leibowitz was reported to have demanded that the ILD observers leave the trial site, however, as a condition for his continuing to represent the accused. “‘Observers’ Leave Scottsboro Trial: Leibowitz Threatened to Quit Case if Radical Group Remained in Decatur,” New York Times, April 3, 1933, 3. For Leibowitz’s life and career, see, among others, Pasley, Not Guilty!; Reynolds, Courtroom; and Leibowitz, The Defender. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and Communism,” Crisis, September 1931, reprinted in Du Bois and Moon, The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, 278–87. For primary resources that offer insights into the vexed relationships and history between communism and African Americans, as well as race and labor in the United States, see Howard, Black Communists Speak on Scottsboro. 7. “Wells Opposes Negroes’ Sentence,” New York Times, September 6, 1931, 25. German communist newspapers proclaimed the innocence of the Boys and urged their comrades around the world to “save the victims of judicial murder.” It was reported, however, that these newspapers













might have been responsible for inciting vandalism of the American Consulate General in Berlin and rioting in the city. “Fight for Doomed Negroes,” New York Times, July 1, 1931, 9. On July 8, 1931, the Tobacco Workers Union of Santiago, Cuba, submitted a protest against the execution to the U.S. Consul in Santiago. It was not accepted, however, for only Cuban diplomatic representatives at Washington could submit formal statements to the U.S. government. “Protest Death Sentences,” New York Times, July 8, 1931, 9. 8. “Protest Conviction of Alabama Negroes,” New York Times, June 28, 1931, 18; and “Protest at Executions,” New York Times, June 29, 1931, 18. 9. For a brief survey of visual works related to the Scottsboro case, see Williams, “Images of Scottsboro.” 10. Langston Hughes to Prentiss Taylor, February 23, 1932, Prentiss Taylor papers, 1885–1991, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 11. Hughes, Scottsboro Limited, 7. 12. “Art Is a Weapon!” New Masses, August 1931, 11. For surveys and in-depth studies on social realist art and its impact, see, among others, Shapiro, Social Realism; and Whiting, Antifascism in American Art. 13. The caption, which is a quote from a Jackson County Sentinel editorial, reads, “The ugly demands of threats from outsiders that Alabama reverse its jury decisions, and filthy insinuations that our people were murderers when they were sincerely being as fair as ever in the history of our county, is rather straining on our idea of fair play. it allows room for the growth of the thought that maybe after all ‘the shortest way out’ in cases like these would have been the best method of disposing of them” (emphasis in original). New Masses, June 1931, 7. 14. Douglas’s portrait resurfaced only in 2005, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery acquired it. Broache, “Portrait of Injustice.” The Notes to Pages 70–74

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portrait is also reproduced in Earle, Aaron Douglas, 25. For a discussion of Guston’s mural, see Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, 27. 15. My gratitude goes to Mr. Kazunobu Abe of Mizoe Art Gallery for hosting a visit, and to Ms. Tomoe Omura for all the invaluable research and contact assistance. 16. In addition to appearing on placards that the demonstrators carried throughout the country, Noda’s version of the slogan was also used in a pamphlet produced by Edmund Bramhall Child and the Scottsboro Defense Committee in New York, entitled The Scottsboro Boys Must Not Die! Mass Scottsboro Defense Meeting at St. Mark’s M.E. Church 137th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue Friday Eve., April 14th, 8 P.M. Protest the Infamous Death Verdict Rendered by an All-White Jury at Decatur, Alabama Against Hayward Patterson (New York: n.p., 1933), New-York Historical Society Archives, New York. 17. He added that he was also “equipped to execute any work in lithography, watercolor and oil painting.” Noda’s PWAP application, January 3, 1934. His Treasury Department applications were stamped on January 23 and March 7, respectively, of the same year, with the latter specifically for the Ferry House at Ellis Island in New York. Records of the Public Buildings Service, Record Group 121, National Archives at New York City. 18. Laning was asked by Audrey McMahon, who became the director of the New York WPA Federal Art Project in 1935, to take over the Ellis Island mural after Noda abandoned the project due to his difficulty in working with Rudolph Reimer, the Commissioner of Immigration. Edward Laning, “Edward Laning: The New Deal Mural Projects,” in O’Connor, The New Deal Art Projects, 86 and 91–92. 19. For extensive studies on the debates, see Langa, Radical Art; Miller, American Encounters; Pohl, Framing America; Corn, The Great American Thing; Doss, Benton,

Pollock; and Hills, Social Concern and Urban Realism, among many others. 20. More established artists, such as John Sloan, George Biddle, Edward Hopper, Millard Sheets, and Grant Wood, also had works in the exhibit. Other Japanese artists included Kaname Miyamoto, Bumpei Usui, and Chuzo Tamotzu. Catalogue of the Forty-Fifth Annual Exhibition. 21. Hemingway points out that the John Reed Club was started in 1929 not as a Communist Party club but as a group with members who were mostly “sympathizers.” Hemingway provides a detailed review of the club’s exhibitions in Artists on the Left, chap. 3, “Revolutionary Art on Display: The John Reed Clubs and the Whitney Museum,” 47–73. Marquardt also delineates the history and development of the John Reed Club and its members in “‘New Masses.’” 22. The World Crisis Expressed in Art: Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings, Prints on the theme of “Hunger, Fascism, War,” held in the club’s gallery at 430 Sixth Avenue in New York City from December 8, 1933, to January 7, 1934. A copy of the exhibition catalogue is in the Philip Evergood papers, 1910–1970, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 23. “The Whitney Museum and the Artist in the Street,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 20, 1935, 38. The exhibition was held from November 27, 1934, to January 10, 1935. While offering no prizes, the museum, with its fund of twenty thousand dollars, purchased selected works from the 153 works in the show. Noda’s Street Scene, which was on display in Gallery IV, was acquired for five hundred dollars. Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, 10. However, Noda’s painting was “deaccessioned in 1954 and sold through the Tobias Fischer Gallery.” Darlene Oden, senior assistant, Registration Department, Whitney Museum of American Art, to Sharon Spain, associate director of the Asian American Art

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Project at Stanford University, August 15, 2005. California Asian American Artists Biographical Survey Records (SC0929), series 1, box 12, folder 13. 24. Louis Lozowick, “John Reed Club Show,” New Masses 10, no. 1 (1934): 27. 25. Ibid. 26. Andrew Hemingway also speculates that Scottsboro Boys was likely Alabama or a related work. Hemingway, whose scholarship offered invaluable resources for my research, remains one of the very few historians of American art who have discussed the work of Noda and other Japanese American artists, such as Ishigaki and Chuzo Tamotzu (1891– 1975). See, in particular, his Artists on the Left, 61–63. Seiichirō Kuboshima (1941–), a Japanese photographer, collector, and biographer, acquired many Noda works over the years. He established a Hideo Noda Memorial Museum in Woodstock, New York, that closed in the mid-1990s. He is also the founder of two museums in Ueda in eastern Nagano Prefecture: Shinano Drawing Museum, where a number of Noda works are housed, and the nearby Mugonkan (Museum of Silence), a museum specializing in collecting and exhibiting young Japanese artists whose promising careers were cut short due to World War II. 27. Bryson, “Portray Hunger, Fascism, War at John Reed Club Art Exhibit: Many Artists New in Revolutionary Work Represented,” Daily Worker, December 1933. Curiously, Bryson, who married fellow artist Ben Shahn and had three works in the exhibit (I.H.S., Unemployed Madonna, and Twilight of the Capitalists), claimed that she never exhibited with the JRC. Oral history interview with Bernarda Bryson Shahn, April 29, 1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. In the same interview, Bryson recalled that Noda was a club member and called him a “wonderful little Japanese artist.” 28. On December 3, 1933, five days before the JRC exhibit opened, Noda gave a

fresco demonstration, along with another muralist, Alfredo de Giorgio Crimi (1900–1994), at the John Reed Club School of Art at 430 Sixth Avenue in New York City. The demonstration was preceded by a talk on “Subject Matter in Murals” by Meyer Shapiro. Edward Alden Jewell, “Art in Review,” New York Times, December 2, 1933, 11. 29. Noda, “Recent Trends in American Art,” Atelier (April 1935); and “Hideo Noda Interview: About American Artist Circle and Visiting Japan,” Atelier (February 1938). 30. The Morgan County Archives in Decatur, Alabama, for example, house a set of photographs showing Patterson and Leibowitz during the 1933 trial in and out of the courtroom. 31. Kuboshima, Noda Hideo Sketchbook, 9. 32. Ibid.; and Kuboshima, “Works and Life of Hideo Benjamin Noda.” “Kwanji” was the spelling that Noda used in his letter to Meyer Schapiro on December 21, 1934. Meyer Schapiro Collection; box 152 and folder 12; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 33. Kuboshima, Noda Hideo Sketchbook, 13. For studies of Uchida’s political life, see Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1894–1945, 162 and 187; and Gates, “Defending the Empire.” 34. Kuboshima, Noda Hideo Sketchbook, 14. In Kuboshima’s “Works and Life of Hideo Benjamin Noda,” the teacher’s name is misspelled as Lillian Souneuschein. Her full name was Lillian Dubois Smith Sonnenschein, and her family moved from Victoria, British Columbia, to settle in Oakland in 1896. She obtained her college degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1917 and taught art at Piedmont High School until 1956. Hughes, Artists in California, 1043. In the Piedmont High School yearbook for 1947, The Clan-O-Log, Lillian Sonnenschein is listed as the teacher in art. 35. Jeff Gunderson, letter to Tsuneyo Kimizuka (conducting research on behalf Notes to Pages 78–84

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of Seiichiro Kuboshima), July 13, 1988, San Francisco Art Institute Library. My special thanks to Jeff Gunderson, librarian at the SFAI’s Anne Bremer Memorial Library, for hosting multiple research visits and locating registration and course records. 36. Terada’s mural Polo is on the second level of Coit Tower. For Terada’s biographies, see Hughes, Artists in California, 1097, and Chang et al., Asian American Art, 431–32. Some of Terada’s papers are in CAAABSR SC0929, box 16, folder 5. 37. Terada, “Recollections of Hideo Noda”. Terada later published a similar essay, “Noda Hideo and I.” 38. Terada, “Recollections of Hideo Noda,” 74. 39. For a comprehensive history of Rivera’s mural projects in San Francisco, see Lee, Painting on the Left. Chapter 4, “Making a Fresco, Showing Another Public,” is especially informative as it features Rivera’s CSFA mural. 40. Rivera with March, My Art, My Life, 127. For studies of the Rockefeller Center mural controversy, see Herner de Larrea, Larrea, and Herrerías, Diego Rivera’s Mural; and Paquette, “Man at the Crossroads,” among others. 41. “Rockefellers Ban Lenin in RCA Mural and Dismiss Rivera,” New York Times, May 10, 1933. It is curious that even though Bloch was an immigrant from Switzerland and Shahn from Lithuania, the reporter somehow was compelled to single out and label Noda as “Japanese”; he was in fact a U.S. citizen. 42. Arnold Blanch began teaching at CSFA in the fall semester of 1930. It was his first trip out west. Blanch returned to Woodstock in 1931 and went to Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933. Oral history interview with Arnold Blanch, June 13–August 3, 1963, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 43. Arnold Wiltz, “The First Woodstock Show: Two Reviews,” Overlook (July 2, 1932): 6–7; Wendell Jones, “The Second 146

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Woodstock Show: Two Reviews,” Overlook (July 16, 1932): 6–7; “Art Exhibit at Woodstock Gallery,” July 1932; and “Art Exhibition Not So Crowded,” September 16, 1932 (source unknown). I am grateful to Emily R. Jones, archivist of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, for locating these magazine and newspaper articles in the WAAM Archives. 44. Terada, “Recollections of Hideo Noda,” 74. Ruth was the sister of Louise Kates Tamotzu, wife of the Japanese émigré artist Chuzo Tamotzu. Louise Kates Tamotzu became a subject of interest in the FBI’s 1951 inquiries into Hideo Noda’s reported espionage activities in Japan (more on this in the next section). Reports obtained from my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding Hideo Benjamin Noda, submitted to the FBI Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS) under the Records Management Division on August 29, 2014. 45. They lived in an apartment at 92 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. This was the address that Noda used for his submission to the Whitney Museum’s Second Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting in 1934. However, it appears that Noda also rented another apartment, perhaps as his studio, at 325 West 13th Street in Lower Manhattan. “Apartments Leased in Lower Manhattan,” New York Times, October 7, 1933, 26. He used this address in his PWAP application in 1934. Records of the Public Buildings Service, Record Group 121, National Archives at New York City. 46. Kuboshima, Noda Hideo Sketchbook, 48, 57. 47. Ruth Noda to Meyer Schapiro, October 12, 1936, Meyer Schapiro Collection, box 152 and folder 12. Her letter was sent from 17 Bethune Street, New York. 48. Noda to Schapiro, September 3, 1936, Meyer Schapiro Collection, box 152 and folder 12.

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49. Kuboshima quoting Terada’s statement about his friend, Noda Hideo Sketchbook, 92–93. 50. Throughout Noda’s numerous letters to Schapiro, Noda persistently asked Schapiro to either send him money or sell his artwork, indicating his dire financial condition. In fact, he stated that the $1.50 per night lodging at King’s Court Hotel in Poughkeepsie, New York, was too expensive for him and that he had to move to the YMCA. Noda to Schapiro, August 30, 1936. 51. Terada, “Recollections of Hideo Noda,” 75; Kuboshima, Noda Hideo Sketchbook, 73. Terada had moved back to Japan earlier in 1935, where he would remain until his death in 1993. In Noda’s letter to Schapiro dated July 29, 1935, Noda mentions that his one-man exhibition was a success in terms of “publicity and making good friend[s],” but a failure in “mak[ing] money.” Earlier in 1935, Noda’s Milk Wagon and Painting were also shown at the ACA Gallery’s Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Japanese Artists in New York, held from February 10 to March 3, 1935. Meyer Schapiro Collection, box 152 and folder 12. 52. Those biographical entries include “Hideo Noda, Painter, Dies in Tokyo at 30: Work of the Japanese-American Artist Widely Known Here,” New York Times, January 14, 1939, 17; Hughes, Artists in California, 818; Lynne Baer, “Benjamin Hideo Noda (1908–1939),” Benjamin Hideo Noda, 1908–1939 [Artist File], 1990, American Art and Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Benjamin Hideo Noda, 1908– 1939 [Artist File], 1990, American Art and Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian American Art Museum; and “Noda, Hideo Benjamin,” in Asian American Art, 397–98. 53. Chambers (1901–1961) gained national attention when, after leaving the CP in 1938, testified as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the Alger Hiss

perjury and espionage trial. Hiss, a lawyer for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, as well as an official in the Department of State, was accused of being a Soviet spy in 1948, a charge that he denied, and was convicted of perjury in 1950. Chambers published a memoir, Witness, which this study draws on for his accounts of Noda’s underground work. Another authorized memoir, Cold Friday, released by his wife, came out in 1964, three years after Chambers’s death. In 1984, Chambers was one of President Ronald Reagan’s Medal of Freedom recipients. My thanks to David Chambers, grandson of Whittaker Chambers, for sharing his insights. His website contains a wealth of useful resources and continuous updates on new discoveries. 54. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 100–101. In Noda’s December 21, 1934, letter to Schapiro, however, he says that one of his cousins was a grandson of Count Uchida and was graduating from Waseda University in the spring of 1935. Whether or not Noda was playing up his connection with the powerful class of Japan could not be verified. Meyer Schapiro Collection, box 152 and folder 12. 55. Chambers, Witness, 367. 56. Ibid.; Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 101; and Weinstein, Perjury, 130. 57. Refer to the books by Chambers, Tanenhaus, and Weinstein for detailed accounts of the Japanese underground network fiasco. 58. Chambers, Witness, 388–89. 59. Weinstein, Perjury, 141 and 328; Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 102. Weinstein and Chambers report that Noda went to his CPUSA superiors and denounced Chambers as a “Trotskyist wrecker” or “Trotskyite,” a serious charge at the time that essentially meant calling Chambers a traitor to the Party. Weinstein, Perjury, 141; Chambers, Witness, 389. Notes to Pages 89–91

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60. Chambers, Witness, 437 and 389. Both Chambers and Schapiro reportedly regretted getting Noda involved in underground work, however brief it had been. Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 102; Weinstein, Perjury, 328. 61. Files from my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding Hideo Benjamin Noda, August 29, 2014. 62. Gusev died on June 10, and both Stokes and Zetkin died on June 20. This means that Noda’s Scottsboro Boys was painted sometime between June and December 1933. 63. Stokes, Shapiro, and Sterling, I Belong to the Working Class. For primary sources, see the Rose Pastor Stokes Papers (MS 573). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library; Zetkin, Selected Writings; Gusev and Browder, Organize Mass Struggle. 64. Khan and Perez, Scottsboro, Alabama. For analyses of the print series, see, in addition to the introduction by Andrew H. Lee for the reissued NYU Press edition, chapter 2 of Apel, Imagery of Lynching. 65. The Hope of the Winter was Noda’s original title, as written on his postcards to Schapiro. The painting has subsequently been retitled Street at the End of Year. Meyer Schapiro Collection, box 388, folder 21.

Susan Fort, Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art, and her assistant, Devi Noor, for their help in accessing the files. 1. Participating museums included LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. 2. Partially sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the exhibition was the Australian version of Art Across America, which had been presented at the National Museum of Korea and the Daejeon Museum of Art, both in South Korea. LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, along with the South Korean and Australian museums, were the co-organizers. The exhibition went on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, from November 8, 2013, through February 9, 2014. http:// www.terraamericanart.org/events/event/ america-painting-a-nation/ (accessed April 14, 2015). 3. Publications in which biographical sketches on Hayakawa have appeared include Miki Hayakawa: A Retrospective; Turner, “A Japanese-American of the Cezanne School”; Brown, Views from Asian California; Kovinick and Yoshiki-Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists, 131–32; Hozumi, “Miki Hayakawa”; Trenton, “Before the World Chapter 4 Moved In,” 66 and 192; and Chang et al., The epigraph at the head of this chapter Asian American Art, 322–24. appears in Turner, “A Japanese-American of 4. Miki Hayakawa: A Retrospective was the Cezanne School,” an article anticipating held at the Santa Fe East Gallery from Miki Hayakawa’s exhibition of portraits October 18 through November 15, 1985. at Santa Fe East Gallery from October 18 “Hayakawa, Miki, b. 1904,” Artist File, through November 15, 1985. I am most Smithsonian American Art Museum grateful for Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick’s / National Portrait Gallery Library, generosity in sharing with me her research Washington, D.C. The text in Trenton, files on Hayakawa (henceforth “Kovinick “Before the World Moved In,” is almost files”). Turner likely obtained the quote from identical to that in the gallery’s press another article, “Miki Hayakawa: A Santa Fe release. New Mexico Artist,” in which the same quote 5. Culley, “The Santa Fe Internment appears. Miki Hayakwa artist files, American Camp,” 58–59. Other sources corroborate Art Department, Los Angeles County Culley’s findings; see, among others, Museum of Art (LACMA). My thanks to Ilene Melzer, “Casualties of Caution and Fear.”

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6. Japanese-American Internee Data File, 1942–1946, Records About Japanese Americans Relocated During World War II, created 1988–89, documenting the period 1942–46. Record Group 210: Records of the War Relocation Authority, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The research staff at NARA’s Textual Archives Services Division could not locate Miki Hayakawa in its War Relocation Authority Evacuee Case Files associated with Santa Fe, either. 7. “Enemy Aliens,” World War II, National and State Council of Defense series, folder 343, box 10, Governor John E. Miles Papers, State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. My thanks to Sibel Melik, senior archivist of the Archives and Historical Services Bureau, State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, for her research assistance. 8. I am grateful to Jan Brooks of Coulter Brooks Art and Antique, Matt Kuhn of the Matt Kuhn Collection and Fine Art Brokerage, and David Astilli of Astilli Fine Art Services, all in Santa Fe, for taking time to share with me many local stories, and mysteries, about Hayakawa. Astilli made a statement that succinctly sums up the way artistic mythologies are constructed: “New Mexico is no different than anywhere else. Truth can be fluid and information becomes traditional thought when enough people hear it over time. Right or wrong.” (The quote is printed with Astilli’s permission.) 9. Oakland Tribune, February 14, 1926, S5. The CSFA award was reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 24, 1925, D3. The painting, Japanese Tea House, is likely the work of the same title in the collections of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. For a reproduction of the painting, see the “Chronology” section in Chang et al., Asian American Art, 491. 10. “Artists and Their Work,” Oakland Tribune, March 14, 1926, S7.

11. “Semi-Weekly Lectures at the Museum,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 22, 1927, D7. 12. The date was given by Michael Brown, the pioneering collector of artworks created by Asian American artists, from whom the museum acquired the work. Miki Hayakwa artist files, LACMA. The museum’s own provenance research is still ongoing. My thanks to Michael Brown and Ilene Fort for sharing their insights over the years. 13. Terada, “Recollections of Hideo Noda,” 73. She also received the Anne Bremer scholarship, according to a New World report (May 20, 1927) in the artist file “Hayakawa, Miki,” CAAABSR (SC0929). 14. The painting was donated to the Monterey Museum of Art by Mateo Lettunich, who certified its provenance by stating that Hayakawa gave him the portrait before World War II, when they met in Monterey, where he was attending a summer music school. The painting stayed on the wall of his various homes in New York for over forty years before arriving at the museum in 2004. Artist Information Sheet, Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California. I am grateful to John Rexine, registrar of the museum, for locating this document and hosting a visit to examine the painting. 15. According to enrollment records, Gee took drawing and painting classes with Spencer and Constance Macky between 1924 and 1926. As the records show that Gee was in Constance Macky’s “Afternoon Life” class during the fall semester of 1926, and Hayakawa also took “Afternoon Life,” offered by Mrs. Macky, it is reasonable to say that the two artists may have been classmates at one point. “San Francisco Art Institute Enrollment Records,” CAAABSR. 16. Michael Brown discovered the two paintings separately, but sold them as a pair to LACMA in 2004. 17. Oldfield studied art and exhibited at the avant-garde Salon des Independents and Salon d’Automne in Paris between 1909 and 1924. He taught at CSFA from 1925 Notes to Pages 98–103

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to 1942 after he returned to the United States. “Otis Oldfield 1890 . . . Biography and Works,” Otis Oldfield papers, 1910–1975, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 18. Argus 1, no. 4 (1927): 5. The Argus billed itself as a “journal of art criticism.” It published monthly issues in a total of five volumes, from April 1927 to April 1929, and was absorbed by Art Digest in 1929. 19. Helen Oldfield, “Otis Oldfield and the San Francisco Art Community, 1920s to 1960s,” an interview conducted by Micaela DuCasse and Ruth Cravath in 1981 (Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley, 1982), 30–31. 20. The Chestnut Street address was Hayakawa’s “return address” for the painting; 105 4th Street, Pacific Grove was her regular address. Other labels on the backs of her paintings submitted to various exhibitions show that she had other return addresses during the 1930s: 3466 21st Street in San Francisco (1931) and 111 3rd Street in Pacific Grove. 21. Joyce Brodsky, an art professor who coauthored/cocurated one of the seminal books/retrospectives on Gee’s art, speculated that Gee probably left the CSFA in October 1926 to establish the Modern Gallery, which later became the San Francisco Art Center. Brodsky, introduction to Cummings and Terenzio, The Paintings of Yun Gee, 22. Gee also founded the Chinese Revolutionary Artists’ Club in the same year. See Lee, “Another View of Chinatown.” 22. “Art: Young Artists Found Gallery,” Wasp, November 6, 1926; and “Artists and Their Work,” Oakland Tribune, November 14, 1926. The Wasp was a San Francisco–based magazine. These clippings are in the Ferdinand Perret Research Material on California Art and Artists, 1769–1942, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Reel 3883. Oldfield’s biography suggests that he was also involved in founding the gallery. “Otis Oldfield 1890 . . . Biography 150

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and Works,” 53, Otis Oldfield papers, 1910–1975, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 23. Argus 1, no. 1 (April 15, 1927): 3. 24. “New York Artist Moves to Mill Valley,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 13, 1927, D7; and Preston McCrossen biographical files, New Mexico Museum of Art. My thanks to Rebecca Potance, librarian/ archivist/webmaster of the NMMA, for her research assistance. 25. Argus 1, no. 1 (April 14, 1927): 4; 1, no. 4 (July 1927): 7; 2, no. 3 (December 1927): 10; 1, no. 5 (August 1927): 3; and 1, no. 6 (September 1927): 3. In addition to his solo show, McCrossen was in the gallery’s group exhibit (April), held solo shows at Little Gallery on Telegraph Hill (July) and the Berkeley Playhouse (December), and participated in the Berkeley League of Fine Arts’ Fifth Summer Exhibition (August) and the Marin County Art Association’s Third Annual Exhibit (August), where he won the first prize in drawing. 26. McCrossen sold his Mill Valley home in September 1928 and relocated to New Mexico: “for sale—mill valley house. Not new, but roomy and interesting 1/4 acre with sun and shade and unobstructed view of mountain. Simply furnished; $3,500; terms. Preston McCrossen, 412 Eldridge Ave., Mill Valley, California.” Argus 3, no. 6 (September 1928): 13. 27. Artist Information Sheet, Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California. 28. Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, Oakland Art Gallery and the Oakland Art League, 1934. She also showed two works at the Oakland Art Gallery’s 1932 annual exhibition. 29. As Valerie J. Matsumoto has delineated, quite a number of women artists of Asian descent were pioneering and contributive members of artist groups in the pre–World War II era. Many achieved greater success in the postwar era. See Matsumoto, “Pioneers, Renegades, and Visionaries.”

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30. Nomura showed Fishing Boats and Suzuki showed Still Life. “Artists and Their Work,” Oakland Tribune, March 14, 1926, S7. 31. Aki Higashi was the other female artist of Japanese descent, but she was born in Hawaii in 1868. According to the catalogue for the exhibition that took place from April 20 through May 6, 1928, the eleven artists of Japanese descent and their works were Hayakawa, Landscape; Aki Higashi, Spring; Milton H. Horiuchi, South San Francisco; K. Matsubara, Din, Peace, and In the Autumn Water; Yasutada Mayeda, Petaluma; Ichitaro Miura, Drawing; Kiyoo Nobuyuki, Autumn Afternoon; Koichi Nomiyama, Fisherman’s Wharf After a Shower and Dyeing; Chiura Obata, Lake Basin in High Sierra: Johnson Peak; Sakari Suzuki, Shack on the Hill; and Masaki Umekubo, Sunset at the Skyline Blvd. 32. The artists of Japanese descent in the exhibition included Hayakawa, From My Window and One Afternoon; Kiyoo Harry Nobuyuki, Alley, Houses of Russian Hill, and Winter; Koichi Nomiyama, At Noon; Kenjiro Nomura, Old House; Yajiro Okamoto, Bridge, Still Life, and Still Life; Yoshida Sekido, Striped Bass; Henry Sugimoto, Violin; Takeo Edward Terada, Cloudy Day and Coming of the Fog; and Kamekichi Tokita, Street. The artists of Chinese descent were David P. Chun, Dong Kingman, and Jade Fon Woo. San Francisco Museum of Art Announcement for Opening at the War Memorial, Civic Center, San Francisco, California, January 18, 1935. 33. For more discussion of the origins and long-term impact of these exclusionary laws, see Lee, At America’s Gates; and Ngai, Impossible Subjects, among many others. 34. See, among others, Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice; Hata, “Undesirables”; Ichioka, The Issei; Van Nuys, “Sowing the Seeds of Internment”; and Walz, Nikkei in the Interior West. 35. Argus 11, no. 1 (1927): 11. Gee’s first solo show at the Modern Gallery took place

from November 15 through November 28, 1926. 36. For a recent comprehensive anthology of the visual manifestations of “Yellow Peril,” see Tchen and Yeats, Yellow Peril! An earlier publication that examined visual representations of xenophobia against the Chinese is Choy, Dong, and Hom, The Coming Man. 37. “A Propos,” in Catalogue of Second Jury Free Exhibition of the Work by Members of East West Art Society in San Francisco Museum of Art, November 17 to December 16, 1922. “San Francisco Museum of Art” refers to the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District of San Francisco, not the museum that opened at the War Memorial Building in the Civic Center in 1935. Letters from Obata to J. N. Laurvik, Esq., Director, Palace of Fine Arts, July 26 and November 23, 1922, “East West Art Society (San Francisco)” and “Obata, Chiura—Correspondence, Oral History Transcript,” CAAABSR. 38. My thanks to ethnomusicologist Kevin Fellezs of Columbia University for clarifying the musical instruments mentioned in the society’s opening-day pamphlet. 39. San Francisco Bulletin, November 20, 1922. 40. Matsusaburo Hibi Papers, 1893–1972, in the Japanese American Research Project, Young Research Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 41. Kinmon Gakuen no ayumi, 1911–1991 / History of Kinmon Gakuen, 80th Anniversary (San Francisco: Kinmon Gakuen, 1991), 6. My thanks to Tami J. Suzuki, librarian and municipal records archivist of the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, for her generous help with my research. 42. Ibid., 9 and 11. 43. “Miki Hayakawa Art Work on Exhibition,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 2, 1929, D5. My multiple attempts to obtain any archival material from the institute were unfruitful. Notes to Pages 107–110

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44. Art writer H. L. Dungan called Hayakawa’s nude that won the scholarship “a well modeled piece of work.” Oakland Tribune, May 22, 1927, S5. My thanks to Jeff Gunderson, librarian of the Anne Bremer Memorial Library at the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as Erica Prater and Michelle Gallagher Roberts, in Registration and Collections at the New Mexico Museum of Art, for offering helpful archival and collection access. 45. Gobind Behari Lal, “Work of Four Years Prove Her Genius,” San Francisco Examiner, June 2, 1929. I am grateful to Tami J. Suzuki for locating the newspaper clipping in the San Francisco Public Library’s archives. 46. He also won the George Westinghouse Award (1946), a Guggenheim fellowship (1956), and the American Medication Association’s distinguished service award (1958). “Obituary: Gobind Behari Lal, Reporter; Shared Pulitzer Prize in 1937,” New York Times, April 3, 1982, 18. 47. Painters and Sculptors of Southern California, in Moure, Publications in Southern California Art 1, 2, and 3, B-59. Hayakawa showed Peggy (1927), One Afternoon (1936), and From My Window (1937). The exhibition records here may still be incomplete, though I have combed through the annual exhibition catalogues of the Oakland Art Gallery and the Oakland Art League (1929–47). 48. Arthur Millier, “Art and Artists: Americans, Federals Orientals Show Art,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1937, C11. See also “To Exhibit California Japanese Work at First Oriental Art Show,” Kashu Mainichi / Japan-California Daily News April 22, 1934; “Open First Oriental Modern Art Exhibit at Gallery in L.A.,” Kashu Mainichi / Japan-California Daily News, April 27, 1934; and “Spiritual Loveliness Found in Oriental Art Exhibition,” Kashu Mainichi / JapanCalifornia Daily News, April 29, 1934. 49. San Francisco Museum of Art Announcement for Opening at the War Memorial, Civic 152

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Center, San Francisco, California, January 18, 1935, 20–21; “17 Paintings by Nippon Artist in Exhibition,” Kashu Mainichi / Japan-California Daily News, January 27, 1935, 1. See note 32 above for the full list of Japanese artists and their works. 50. The NMMA lists the date of One Afternoon as “circa 1940,” which is incorrect. It is very difficult to identify the third painting, Portrait, for there were quite a few works in Hayakawa’s oeuvre that she simply named “portrait,” including ones in the SFAA (1927), the Society of Women Artists (1931), the Oakland Art Gallery (1933), the Golden Gate International Exposition Exhibition of Paintings (1939), the Fiesta Group Shows in New Mexico (1947 and 1950), and the Thirty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors of New Mexico (1950). 51. My sincere thanks to Sandra Dijkstra and Professor Bram Dijkstra for hosting a visit and sharing with me the information and image of this major painting in their art collections. 52. From My Window is one of the very few Hayakawa paintings that have been reproduced more than once in the existing but scant literature, thanks to art historian Patricia Trenton, who first mentioned the painting in Trenton and D’Emilio, Independent Spirits, 32 and 34, pl. 27 (although there are two approximate dates, ca. 1934 and ca. 1937, that accompany the illustration, on pages 34 and 35). Trenton provides a more extended biographical sketch of Hayakawa in Landauer, Gerdts, and Trenton, The Not-So-Still Life, 66, 192, and 210n28. 53. Lee, Painting on the Left, 130–59. See also Zakheim, Coit Tower, San Francisco. Zakheim was the daughter of noted San Francisco muralist Bernard Zakheim, one of the painters who worked on Coit Tower’s murals. 54. I am using the title Worker as it was listed for the 2001 sale by the auction house Bonhams in San Francisco. AskArt.com

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auction records online, accessed August 12, 2014. This is likely the painting that Hayakawa previously called Boy Sawing, a work that was shown in the Oakland Art Gallery’s annual exhibition in 1936 but might have been created before then, based on Hayakawa’s pattern of submitting the same painting to multiple shows over many years. 55. Hayakawa, Edward, and Lettunich were also friends with the local artist and writer Bruce Wallace Ariss Jr. and his wife, Jean Ariss, who were close to author John Steinbeck and marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts. Bearded and married, with a teenage son, in the mid-1930s, Ed, or “Doc,” as he was known, was unlikely to have been Hayakawa’s subject in these portraits. 56. Lettunich, Artist Information Sheet, Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California. My thanks to Steve Hauk of Hauk Fine Arts in Pacific Grove for sharing with me useful information on the local history and people. 57. Handwritten on the back of the photograph is Hayakawa’s note to her good friend and fellow Santa Fe artist William “Bill” Ford: “To Bill Ford. Nov. 1st to 15th 1944. One man show. Miss Jones Curator of Museum of New Mexico. Sold 4 paintings.” Special thanks to Jan Brooks for sharing this photograph with me. 58. “Hayakawa, Miki—Pacific Grove. 103. Portrait,” in Illustrated Catalogue, 1939, 36; and “Hayakawa, Miki—Pacific Grove. 46. From My Window,” in Illustrated Catalogue, 1940, 46. 59. Hayakawa’s father was reportedly so upset that he responded, “Very well, if you must paint, please leave the house.” Turner, “A Japanese-American of the Cezanne School,” 19. The same quote also appeared in the earlier article “Miki Hayakawa: A Santa Fe New Mexico Artist.” But this bit of information might have been part of a personal mythology, perhaps constructed by the artist herself. For Hayakwa did not appear to have been “disowned” by her father, at

least not in the 1920s, according to her parents’ 1930 census records or her listed permanent addresses (2311 Eagle Avenue, Alameda, California) in the San Francisco Art Association’s exhibition catalogues of 1925, 1927, and 1928. 60. The photographers were Hisao Kimura, Jiro Kai, and G. K. Sayano from Los Angeles and K. Wakasa and Alice Yamakawa from San Francisco. Sugimoto showed an oil landscape and a watercolor of bamboo and sparrows. Obata had a watercolor, Rain Storm, Yosemite, in the show. Illustrated Catalogue, 1939, 39, 41–43. 61. For studies on the exposition and San Francisco’s Treasure Island, see Shanken, Into the Void Pacific; Schrenk, “Utopian Visions”; and James and Weller, Treasure Island, among many others. 62. Portrait, which was acquired, conserved, and sold by Trotter Galleries in Carmel, California, has the following exhibition labels: Sacramento State Fair (1935; medaled), GGIE (1939; medaled), New Mexico State Fair (1946; second prize); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibit (1947). I am grateful to Richard Sakai for sharing with me his expansive art collections and to Benjamin Morse for facilitating my visits to examine and photograph the many works by Hayakawa in Sakai’s collections. 63. There is also another label on One Afternoon’s frame for an undated California State Fair art exhibition at the State Fair Gallery in Sacramento, and the handwriting has characteristics from the other two. 64. These publications included Contemporary Art. Official Catalog. Department of Fine Arts, Division of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939 and Art. Official Catalog. Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1940, to cite only two of the additional seven that I examined. 65. The original title written in pencil on the label for an undated Oakland Art Notes to Pages 118–122

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Gallery exhibition was “Portrait of Negro,” and the article “a” was added to the title as used in the 2000–2001 exhibition organized by novelist Lisa See for the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, On Gold Mountain: A Chinese American Experience. 66. The Pacific Grove–San Francisco combination also appears on the Oakland exhibit submission forms affixed to four paintings in the collections of Coulter Brooks Art and Antiques in Santa Fe. Thanks to Jan Brooks and Lane Coulter for taking the time to host my visit and examination of Hayakawa’s works. 67. “Hayakawa lived in San Francisco from 1929 to 1937 and in Pacific Grove, 1937– 1940” (Chang et al., Asian American Art, 322); “she resided in Pacific Grove and Monterey during the late 1930s and early 1940s” (Kovinick and Yoshiki-Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists, 131). “Miki Hayakawa (1890–1965),” Monterey Public Library Artists Files. The accuracy of this entry is questionable, as it has the wrong death year. My thanks to librarians Inga Labeaune and Dennis Copeland for their assistance. 68. El Palacio 50, no. 10 (October 1943): 250; and 30th Annual Exhibition. My thanks to Marian Kovinick for sharing with me the latter document. 69. El Palacio was a magazine published by the School of American Research, the Museum of New Mexico, and the Archaeological Society of New Mexico. El Palacio 52, no. 1 (1945): 8; 52, no. 12 (1945): 265; 53, no. 10 (1946): 278; and 54, no. 12 (1947) 271. 70. Albuquerque Library files, Archives of American Art, reel 1308. A copy of the page is in the Kovinick files. 71. McCrossen stated in an interview that the three of them formed a “helpful and stimulating” group, as they went on trips, painted from nature, and critiqued each other’s works. Turner, “A JapaneseAmerican of the Cezanne School,” 24. 72. “SFE Interviews: Bernique Longley,” Santa Fe East (Winter 1987–Spring 1988): 154

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13; Turner, “A Japanese-American of the Cezanne School,” 20. 73. “Miki Hayakawa. A Santa Fe New Mexico Artist,” undated magazine clipping in the Hayakawa artist files, LACMA. 74. Ford and Hayakawa remained friends and corresponded as Ford moved around the country. My thanks to David Astilli, who manages the Ford estate, for sharing with me Ford’s files and paintings. 75. Membership records, 1921, 1941–51, San Francisco Art Association and related organizational records, 1871–1978, Archives of American Art, Reel 2429. 76. “Santa Fe Artist Has Exhibit in Denver Store,” Pacific Citizen, October 19, 1946, 2. 77. For Tamotzu’s life and career, see Chuzo Tamotzu papers, 1920–1982, and “Oral History Interview with Chuzo Tamotzu, 1964 September 3,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Many of his artworks are reproduced in Hideo Benjamin Noda and Chuzo Tamotzu. 78. Hayakawa to Albert M. Bender grant-inaid, April 6, 1943, Oakland Museum of California Artist Files. The letter further compounds the discrepancies concerning Hayakawa’s age. She claimed to have immigrated to the United States when she was seven, more than “twenty-five years” before 1943, which dates her immigration to about 1918 or a few years earlier. That would then put her birth year at around 1910 or so. The 1930 U.S. Census shows, however, that she was “estimated” to have been born in 1904 and immigrated to the United States in 1911. The discrepancy must be a result of her inexact memory or calculation, or an approximation put forth to make herself a few years younger, or perhaps an error in the census entry. Even this rare piece of first-person biographical information seems to further obfuscate the true chronology of Hayakawa’s life. 79. The inquiry letter was sent in September 1943 from box 1072, Santa Fe, N. M. “List of active artist members eligible for the Artists’ Fund Prize,” September 16, 1943,

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2; and “Changes of address on mailing list of members SFAA,” September 18, 1943, 1. Membership records, SFAA, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

7. My thanks to Mr. Ryuta Hayashida, Curator at the Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, for providing the history of the international transaction. Gail G. Anderson’s letter is in the artist file, “Noda, Benjamin Hideo, 1908–1939,” American Art and Portrait Epilogue Gallery Library, Smithsonian American 1. Paintings by New York Chinese-Japanese Art Museum. Kelly Gust, reporter for Artists, sponsored by American Artists the Oakland Tribune, wrote about the Congress, Artists Union, Citizen pending sale of the mural in “Hidden Committee for Support of W.P.A., ACA Treasure. Piedmont High to Sell Mural Gallery, 52 West 8th Street, New York by Japanese Master,” June 13, 1990. City, September 12–26, 1937. 8. The Board’s intent was to keep the 2. “Harry Gottlieb Is Dead; W.P.A. Artist corpus intact and use only the earned Was 98,” New York Times, July 8, 1992. interest. “Piedmont Unified School 3. Ishigaki showed three paintings: Basque District Minutes of Regular Meeting of Woman and Soldier, Basque Woman, the Governing Board March 14, 2007.” In and Ku Klux Klan (also known as South the Governing Board’s meeting on March U.S.A.). 14, 2012, it was reported that the Noda 4. Schapiro, “Race, Nationality, and Art.” Fund remained fully funded. Ward’s speech is reprinted in Baigell and 9. The Woodstock Artists Association and Williams, Artists Against War and Fascism, Museum in Upstate New York owns 119–20. A more extended discussion of a Noda drawing; Morgan Anderson both Schapiro’s essay and Ward’s speech Consulting, a firm based in New York in relation to Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s 1940 City, loaned a Noda lithograph to the speech “What Is an American Art?” Woodstock museum’s Maverick exhibition in 2006 (August 5–November 5). I appears in my book Becoming American?, am grateful to Emily Jones in Woodstock 29–31 and 43–44. For a recent study of for locating these records in their New Deal programs vis-à-vis immigration archives. and Nativism, see Cybelle Fox, “The WPA and the (Short-Lived) Triumph of Nativism,” in Three Worlds of Relief, 214–49. 5. See, for example: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926), in Du Bois and Moon, The Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, 360–68; and Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, 3–16. 6. The conversations were off the record, but they took place on several occasions when galleries and art dealers, in both the United States and Japan, asked me to relay the availability of artwork to my museum contacts. I traced the history of the “repatriation” of Kuniyoshi’s works, with major American art museums as willing facilitators, in the epilogue to Becoming American?, 138–48. Notes to Pages 127–130

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

American Landscape, An (JRC collaboration illustration), 59 ACA (American Contemporary Art) Gallery American modernism, term usage and definition, 5 exhibitions at, 40, 47, 62, 141n35, 147n51 Angie (Hayakawa), 123 exhibition statements on WPA protest, Annual Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture 127–28 (Oakland Art Gallery Annual founding and mission, 140n22 Exhibition), 107, 150n28 Advancing American Art (exhibition), 129 antifascism, 2, 40, 57–59, 78 African Americans. See also Scottsboro Boys anti-immigration, 3–4, 6–7, 107, 108, 109 Asian American relationships with, 42, anti-Semitism, 71, 121 45, 47, 77 Argus (journal), 103, 105, 106, 107 civil rights discourses, 64 Ariss, Bruce Wallace, Jr., 153n55 Communism for emancipation of, 71 heroic defiance themes, 42, 60–62, 64, 66 Ariss, Jean, 153n55 Arm (Ishigaki, E.), 56 lynching as art theme, 58, 61, 62, 73, 74 Art Everywhere US campaign, 97 miscegenation laws focused on, 36 Artists on the Left (Hemingway), 3, 40 portrait paintings of (see Portrait of a Artist Studio (Gee), 101, 103, 104 Negro) Artists’ Union of New York, 127, 128 racial vs. American identity, 128–29 Art Students League, 47, 86 slavery justifications, 35 Asian American Art (Chang, et al.), 1, 3, 40 socioeconomic inequality, 92–93 assimilationism, 3, 33–35, 45 traditional depictions of, 42, 61 authorial participation, 9, 12, 26–27, 31–33, working class depictions, 93, 95 36–37 WWI imagery and exclusion of, 60 Alabama (Scottsboro Boys) (Noda), 75–81, 76, Bard, Phil: By the Way Sheriff, What Did That 89, 91–93 Nigger Do?, 61 Alabama, Powell v., 71 Bartlett, John Henry, 60 Alabama Code: “Our Girls Don’t Sleep with Bates, Ruby, 69 Niggers” (Biddle), 74 Bayard, Hippolyte: Self-Portrait as a Drowned Allen, Thomas B., 141–42n51, 142n53, 142n59 Man, after Daguerre, 20 America: Painting a Nation (exhibition), 97 Bellows, George American Artists’ Congress, 2, 40, 155n1 art subject specialties, 53 American Contemporary Art Gallery. See ACA Law Is Too Slow, The, 61 Gallery Bentley, Robert, 70 American Cossacks (Ishigaki, E.), 55, 56, 59 Berkeley League of Fine Arts, 99, 106, 150n25 American Feature Writers Syndicate, 90

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“Beyond an Alliance of Color” (Koshiro), 40, 42 Biddle, George Alabama Code: “Our Girls Don’t Sleep with Niggers,” 74 exhibitions featuring, 77, 144n20 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting (Whitney Museum of American Art), 78, 129 birth control advocacy, 48, 50 Blanch, Arnold, 86 blankets, as photographic props, 9, 21, 25, 33–36 Bloc[h], Lou, 86 Bloch, Lucienne, 86 Boag, Peter, 31 Bonus Army (Bonus March) African American veteran participation, 141–42n51 art depicting, 60 (see also Bonus March, The) demonstration purpose, 39, 42–43 forced removal and encampment fires, 43, 43 internal conflicts, 43 racial desegregation and solidarity of, 64 Bonus Army: An American Epic, The (Dickson and Allen), 141–42n51, 142n53, 142n59 Bonus Army, The (Morrow), 142n58 Bonus March, The (Ishigaki, E.) art style descriptions, 58 composition and art style descriptions, 38, 39, 42, 44, 58 nudity symbolism, 66 sociopolitical influences on, 42–45, 47–48, 50–52 sociopolitical themes, 60–61, 62, 64 Bonus March and the New Deal, The (Bartlett), 60 borderlands, 12, 31 Bothwell, Dorr, 105, 107 Bourgeois Virtue in Scottsboro (Gellert), 73–74, 74, 80 Boxing (Ishigaki, E.), 53, 53 Boyle Kanno, Gertrude Farquharson, 48, 49, 50, 107 Boynton, Ray, 86, 108 Break Up (Noda), 77 Brodsky, Joseph R., 71 Brooks, Tim, 136n55

Brown, John, 66 Brown, Michael, 149n12, 149n16 Brown, Mrs. C. A., 19, 19 Brown, William Compton, 19, 19 Bryson, Bernarda, 55, 78–79, 145n27 Burck, Jacob exhibitions featuring, 77 New Masses cover, 61, 73, 74, 75 Byrne, Ethel, 48 By the Way Sheriff, What Did That Nigger Do? (Bard), 61 Calhoun, Dorothy, 62 California College of Arts and Crafts, 98 California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) (now San Francisco Art Institute) awards and scholarships, 99, 110 instructors at, 84, 103, 146n42 Rivera murals at, 75, 86 students of, 2, 75, 84, 98, 100, 107, 140n19 Campin, Robert: Mérode Altarpiece, 117 Castiglione, Countess de, 11 Cecil Chiliwhist and Her Aunt Pose at Matsura’s Studio (Matsura), 137n64 Chambers, Whittaker, 90, 91, 141n48, 147n59 Chaotic Age (Noda), 77–78 Chi, Tseng Kwong, 11 Chicago Defender (newspaper), 70–71, 80 Child, Edmund Bramhall, 144n16 Chiliwhist, Cecil Jim, 21, 22, 33, 34, 35, 137n64 Chiliwhist Jim (Matsura), 21, 22 Chinese Exclusion Act, 107 Chinese Refugees (Ishigaki, E.), 57 citizenship restrictions, 16, 60, 121, 126 Clifford, James, 3, 4 Coit Tower murals of, 84, 115, 146n36 paintings featuring, 114, 114, 117 Cold Friday (Chambers), 147n53 Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) Bonus March camps associated with, 43 cultural arm of, 40, 77 espionage activities, 89–91 founders of, 45 legal arm of, 62, 71 paintings paying homage to, 89, 91–92 publications associated with, 42, 57 Scottsboro case as propaganda for, 71 sociopolitical roles, 91 Conrad, Earl, 142–43n3 Index

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cosmopolitanism, 3, 7, 12, 100, 112–13, 117, 128 CPUSA. See Communist Party U.S.A. Crash on the Street (Ishigaki, E.), 59–60 Cravath, Ruth, 105, 107 Crimi, Alfredo de Giorgio, 145n28 Crisis (magazine), 64, 71 Cristo Rey Church (Hayakawa), 123, 123 cross-culturalism, 3, 7, 12, 100, 112–13, 117, 128 cross-dressers, 31–32 Curtis, Edward S. photographic projects of, 22, 23, 24 power relation depictions, 136n56 WORKS: Hamat’sa Emerging from the Woods— Koskimo, 25, 25 On The Shores of Clear Lake, 25 Vanishing Race—Navaho, The, 22, 23, 24 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques Mandé: Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man, Bayard after, 20 Daily Worker (newspaper), 42, 57, 62, 66, 90 Dalí, Salvador, 79 David, Sylvester, 138n77 Death (Noguchi), 61 Demo (Ishigaki, E.), 59–60 Demonstration (Lozowick), 141n44 Demonstration (Noda), 77 diasporic displacement art as engagement tool, 11–12, 100 coexistence of diversity, 9, 24–25, 26, 27, 33 community descriptions, 12, 16 cross-cultural identity transformations, 3–5, 7, 12, 112–13, 117, 128 solidarity due to empathy of, 36, 42, 47, 77, 81, 127–28 Dickson, Paul, 141–42n51, 142n53, 142n59 Dillabough, Norma, 10, 27, 28, 29 disabilities, people with, 47 Dollie Graves and Pearl Rasilbarth at Matsura’s Studio (Matsura), 30, 31 Douglas, Aaron: Scottsboro Boys, 74 Douglass, Frederick, 66 Down with the Swastika (Ishigaki, E.), 57 Dreiser, Theodore, 72 Du Bois, W. E. B., 64, 71, 129 Dunham, Frank, 105 Duroc, Margaret, 62 “Dying West?, A” (Mimura), 11, 22, 24

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Early Spring (Noda), 86 East West Art Society, 108–9 Easy Winter (Noda), 77, 83 education, 34–35, 109–10 “Education of the Japanese Woman” (Matsura), 32 “8 Black Boys” (Taylor), 73 Emancipation of Negro Slaves (Ishigaki, E.), 66, 66–67 Entrance to Subway (Noda), 93, 94 espionage, 50, 89–91, 146n44 exclusionism anti-immigration legislation, 3–4, 6–7, 107, 108 citizenship restrictions, 16, 60, 121, 126 education restrictions, 109–10 employment discrimination, 60, 67, 127–28 Japanese wartime relocations, 98, 100 Native American: assimiliation requirements, 33–35; relocation, 12, 16, 34 trial jury restrictions, 71 Exhibition of Works by California Artists (Golden Gate International Exposition), 120–21, 147n51 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 50, 91 Federal Art Project (FAP), 60, 66, 144n18 Fiesta Group, 123, 152n50 Fight (Ishigaki, E.), 56 Fleishhacker, Herbert, 115 Flight (Ishigaki, E.), 57 Flores, Sanchez, 86 Ford, William artist associates of, 125 Hayawaka portraits of, 125, 125 Miki, 124, 125 Francis, Jacqueline, 60 Frank Matsura (Roe), 3, 134n5 From My Window (Hayakawa), 113–15, 114, 117, 120, 121, 151n32 Gardner, Joe, 64 Gee, Yun art education, 149n15 artist collective galleries cofounded by, 103, 105–6 Artist Studio, 101, 103, 104 exhibitions and reviews, 105, 108 museum acquisitions of artworks by, 129 personality and descriptions, 103

Index

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portrait paintings of, 103, 105 public exposure of, 1 residences of, 105 in studio, 106 Gellert, Hugo Bourgeois Virtue in Scottsboro, 73–74, 74, 80 New Masses: illustrations on civil rights, 142n58; scholarly studies, 55 Scottsboro Legal Lynching—The Face of the NAACP, with the Arms of the Bosses, 74 Genauer, Emily, 40 Gillmer, Jason A., 37 Ginza Seijusha Art Gallery, 90 Girl In A Train (Noda), 86 Girl in Car (Noda), 81, 82 Gogh, Vincent van, 18 Gold, Michael, 57 Golden Gate Institute (Kinmon Gakuen), 109–10, 112, 113 Golden Gate International Exposition, 2, 107, 120–21, 147n51 Gottlieb, Harry, 127–28, 131 Grant, Ulysses S., 16 Great Wave at Kanagawa, The (Hokusai), 18 Green, Rayna, 24, 26 Gropper, Sophie, 51 Gropper, William artist associates of, 51 artist organization memberships, 141n48 exhibitions featuring, 77 WORKS: Invading Grafters’ Paradise, 61, 62 New Masses illustrations, 55, 58, 61, 142n58 Gusev [Gussev], Sergeĭ Ivanovich, 89, 91 Guston, Philip, 74 Hall, Parker, 105 Hall, Stuart, 4 Hamat’sa Emerging from the Woods—Koskimo (Curtis), 25, 25 hammer-and-sickle motifs, 56 Harlem Courthouse mural (Ishigaki, E.), 64–67, 65, 66 Harlem on My Mind (exhibition), 129 Harpster, Kristin, 33, 134n5, 136n55 Hawkins, A. E., 69 Hayakawa, Miki. See also One Afternoon; Portrait of a Negro art collectives and association memberships, 98, 103, 106, 123



art style descriptions, 115, 125 associates, 100, 103, 106, 124–25, 126, 153n55 awards, 99, 108, 110, 123 background and mythology, 98–99, 126 death of, 98, 121, 131 descriptions and personality, 124, 125 education, 2, 47, 98 exhibitions: group, 2, 106, 107, 108, 109, 113, 120–22, 123, 125; retrospective, 98; solo, 109–10, 112–13, 125–26 museum acquisitions of artwork by, 110, 121, 129 at New Mexico Museum of Art solo exhibition, 120, 121 on painting as reflection of self, 97, 100 papers and archives of, 99 parental disapproval, 98, 120 portrait paintings of, 124, 125 residences and relocations, 98, 103, 106, 122–23, 126 romance and marriage, 98–99, 119–20 scholarly neglect and rediscovery, 7, 97–98 sketching classes organized by, 124 WORKS: Angie, 123 Cristo Rey Church, 123, 123 From My Window, 113–15, 114, 117, 120, 121, 151n32 Hydrangea, 109 Japanese Tea House, 149n9 Landscape, 151n31 Lucille, 106 Music, 101, 117, 118, 119 Nude, 106 Portrait, 106, 120, 121, 122, 152n50 Portrait of a Young Man, 113, 118 Summer in Waldo, 109 Tulips, 113, 122 Untitled (Female Nude), 110, 112 Untitled (Seated Female Nude), 110, 111 Untitled (Young Man Playing Ukulele), 101, 102, 110, 119 William Ford, 125, 125 Worker (Boy Sawing), 118, 119, 119 Yakima Indian Girl, 99 Young Man, A, 99, 101, 108 Head of a Woman (Ishigaki, E.), 48, 49, 140n26 Hemingway, Andrew, 3, 40, 144n21, 145n26 Index

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Hibi, Hisako Shimizu, 107, 109, 121 Hibi, Matsusaburo, 107, 108, 109 Hideo Noda Memorial Museum, 145n26 Hiss, Alger, 147n53 Hokusai, Katsushika: Great Wave at Kanagawa, The, 18 homosexuals, 31–32 Hoover, Herbert, 43 Hoovervilles, 43, 43 Hope of the Winter, The (Noda), 93, 93 Hughes, Langston, 72 Hunger, Fascism, War (exhibition), 59, 77–79 Hydrangea (Hayakawa), 109 ILD (International Labor Defense), 62, 71, 72 Immigration Act of 1924, 3–4, 6–7, 107 immigration and immigrants. See also diasporic displacement community acceptance and integration, 14–16 Japanese statistics, 109 legislation restricting, 3–4, 6–7, 107 perception of Asians, 4, 108 Inokuma, Yoshio, 84, 109 Inomata, Tsunao, 47 Inside of a Bus (Noda), 93, 94, 95 Interior of Judge William Compton Brown’s Home (Matsura), 19, 19 International Labor Defense (ILD), 62, 71, 72 International Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW), 57–59 Invading Grafters’ Paradise (Gropper, W.), 61, 62 Ishigaki, Ayako Tanaka, 48, 50–51, 138n1 Ishigaki, Eitarō. See also Bonus March, The artist collective memberships, 2, 40, 59 art style descriptions, 39, 42, 52–53, 58 art themes, 42, 52 associates, 45, 47, 48, 50 Bonus March impact on, 44–45 book illustrations by, 51 children of, 51 current location of works by, 138n1 death, 51 economic class and labor solidarity, 45, 47–48 editorial positions, 47, 50 education, 2, 47, 139n11, 140n19 with Emancipation of Negro Slaves mural, 66 172

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espionage interrogations, 50 exhibitions and reviews, 40, 42, 47, 59, 62, 141n35 magazine illustrations, 56–57 marriage, 48, 51 museum acquisitions of artwork by, 138n1 personality and descriptions, 51 racism and exclusionist experiences, 60, 67 religious background, 139n11 residences, 48 scholarly studies on, 3, 40 WORKS: American Cossacks (Unemployment Demonstration), 55, 56, 59 Boxing, 53, 53 Crash on the Street (Demo), 59–60 Down with the Swastika, 57 Emancipation of Negro Slaves, 66, 66–67 Fight, 56 Flight (Chinese Refugees), 57 Harlem Courthouse mural, 64–67, 65, 66 Head of a Woman, 48, 49 I Will Not Speak, 77 Jobless Music Band (Penny Musician), 47 Ku Klux Klan (South U.S.A.), 56–57, 58, 62, 63 Noose, The (Lynching), 58, 62 Nuns and Flappers, 47 Resistance, 52, 52 Resistance of Woman, 52 Revolt on the Island of Cuba, 55, 55, 59–60 Self-Portrait, 46 Soldiers of People’s Front (The Zero Hour), 56, 57 Spanish Woman, 52 Spirit of 1776, The, 66 Town (Processional—1925), 46, 47 Undefeated Arm (Arm), 56 Uprising, 55, 59 War Tractor, 40, 41 Whipping (The Whip), 53–55, 54, 58, 64 IURW (International Union of Revolutionary Writers), 57–59 I Will Not Speak (Ishigaki, E.), 77 Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 125–26 Japanese American National Museum, 149n9 Japanese Communist Party, 45

Index

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Japanese immigrants, overview art exhibition inclusion, 107–8, 113, 120–21 citizenship restrictions, 16, 60, 121 racism toward, 107, 108, 109 statistics (1908), 109 wartime relocation policies, 98, 129 Japanese Tea House (Hayakawa), 149n9 Japonisme, 18, 117 Jasieński, Bruno, 57–59 Jessie Dillabough, Two Women, Matsura and a Dog, Outdoors (Matsura), 27, 28 Jewell, Foster, 123 Jim, Cecil (Cecil Chiliwhist), 21, 22, 33, 34, 35, 137n64 Jobless Music Band (Ishigaki, E.), 47 John Reed Club (JRC), 2, 40, 58–59, 77–79, 144n21 John Reed Club School of Art, 145n28 Johnson, Malvin Gray: Negro Soldiers, with Richardson, 60 Johnson-Reed Act (1924), 3–4, 6–7, 107 Jones, Wendell, 86 Joseph of the Nimi’ipuu (Nez Perce), Chief, 21, 23, 33 JRC (John Reed Club), 2, 40, 58–59, 77–79, 144n21 Kainen, Jacob, 42 Kaizō (journal), 47, 50 Kallen, Horace, 36 Kanno, Gertrude Farquharson Boyle, 48, 49, 50, 107 Kanno, Takeshi, 48, 50 Kaplan, Virginia and Joseph, 51 Katayama, Sen, 45, 47 Khan, Lin Shi: Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts, with Perez, 92–93 Kharkov International Conference, 57 Kimura, Kumaji, 14 Kinmon Gakuen (Golden Gate Institute), 109–10, 112, 113 Klimt, Gustav, 18 Kober’s Book Store, 125–26 Koshiro, Yukiko, 40, 42 Kublin, Hyman, 45 Kuboshima, Seiichirō, 83, 87, 130, 131, 145n26 Ku Klux Klan (South U.S.A.) (Ishigaki, E.), 56–57, 58, 62, 63 Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, 130

Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 86, 128, 130–31, 140n22, 140n24 Kurihara, Tatsuo, 14 LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 97, 113, 120, 149n16 Lal, Gobind Behari, 112–13 Landscape (Hayakawa), 151n31 Landscape of an Okanogan Homestead (Matsura), 17, 17 Laning, Edward, 77 Law Is Too Slow, The (Bellows), 61 League of Struggle for Negro Rights, 72 Lee, Anthony W., 115 Lee, Nikki S., 11 Léger, Fernand, 79 Leibowitz, Samuel, 71, 80 Lenin, Vladimir (Leninism), 47, 86 Lettunich, Mateo, 106, 119, 149n14, 153n55 Liberator (journal), 57 Lincoln, Abraham, 66, 66–67 Locke, Alain, 129 Longley, Bernique, 124 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 97, 113, 120, 149n16 Loving v. Virginia, 36 Lozowick, Louis art motif specialties, 141n44 exhibitions and reviews, 77, 78 New Masses illustration art style and criticism response, 58 political artist organization memberships, 141n48 WORKS: Demonstration, 141n44 Lynching (Lynch Law), 58, 59, 61, 74, 78 Moors over Spain (The Moors Return), 141n44 Strike Scene, 61–62 Tanks #1 (The Tank), 58, 58 Tear Gas, 141n44 Lucille (Hayakawa), 106 lynching, 58, 61, 62, 70, 73, 74, 78 Lynching (Ishigaki, E.), 58, 62 Lynching (Lynch Law) (Lozowick), 58, 59, 61, 74, 78 MacArthur, Douglas, 43, 44 Macky, Constance, 108, 120, 149n15 Macky, Spencer, 84, 99, 108, 120, 149n15 Index

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Maeda, Daryl J., 45 Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, The (Rivera), 75, 86 Man at the Crossroads (Rockefeller mural) (Rivera), 2, 75, 86 Manus, Rosalie, 105, 107 Marquardt, Virginia Hagelstein, 56 marriage, interracial, 12, 33, 36–37, 48, 87 Mathilda Schaller, Matsura, and Friends (Matsura), 27, 29, 29, 31 Matsura, Cecil Jim, and Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio (Matsura), 33, 34 Matsura, Frank authorial participation practices, 9, 12, 26–27, 29, 31–33, 35–37 biographical information, 12–17 community reception and integration, 14–16 current location of archives/works by, 9 death and memorial, 15–16, 131 education, 14 landscape photography, 17–18 legacy, 133n6 personality and identity re-presentations, 12 photographic portraiture: community, 18–19; Native American, 20–27, 33, 35–37 photojournalism, 16 scholarly studies on, 2–3, 134n5 self-portraits and performance, 11, 11 studios of, 13, 13 on women in society, 32 WORKS: Cecil Chiliwhist and Her Aunt Pose at Matsura’s Studio, 137n64 Chiliwhist Jim, 21, 22 Dollie Graves and Pearl Rasilbarth at Matsura’s Studio, 30, 31 Interior of Judge William Compton Brown’s Home, 19, 19 Jessie Dillabough, Two Women, Matsura and a Dog, Outdoors, 27, 28 Landscape of an Okanogan Homestead, 17, 17 Mathilda Schaller, Matsura, and Friends, 27, 29, 29, 31 Matsura, Cecil Jim, and Young Men Pose for Portraits at Matsura’s Studio, 33, 34 Matsura and Miss Cecil Chiliwhist, 33, 35 174

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Matsura and Norma Dillabourgh Studio Portraits, 9–11, 10, 29 Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio, 8, 9, 11, 26–27, 33–37 Matsura in Clown Costumes, 11, 11 Matsura with Orril Gard and Mathilda Schaller at His Studio and Gallery During Christmas Rush, 13, 13 Okanogan Baseball Team vs. Mission Team, 26, 27 Okanogan Fourth of July Parade, John C. Schaller’s Bakery Float, 18, 19 Okanogan Scrapbook, 17, 17 Sunrise and Telephone Pole, 17–18, 18 Twit-mich or “Big Jim,” Charley Leo, Suzanne Leo, and “Little Joe”, 20–21, 21 Two Young Men Pose for Portraits at Mastura’s Studio, 30, 31 Washington Kloochman, 21 Woman in Drag Sits on a Stoop and Smokes Cigar, 32, 32 Matsura, Shigenobu, 14 Matsura, Yasushi, 14 Matsura and Miss Cecil Chiliwhist (Matsura), 33, 35 Matsura and Norma Dillabourgh Studio Portraits (Matsura), 9–11, 10, 29 Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (Matsura), 8, 9, 11, 26–27, 33–37 Matsura in Clown Costumes (Matsura), 11, 11 Matsura with Orril Gard and Mathilda Schaller at His Studio and Gallery During Christmas Rush (Matsura), 13, 13 Maverick (exhibition), 155n9 McCrossen, Preston biographical information, 98–99, 106 exhibitions of, 106, 123 papers and archives of, 99 Woman Sewing, 106 McMahon, Audrey, 144n18 Men Like Gods (Wells), 50 Mérode Altarpiece (Campin), 117 Michelangelo, 44 Miki (Ford), 124, 125 Milk Wagon (Noda), 147n51 Miller, Angela, 4 Millier, Arthur, 113 Mimura, Glen, 11, 22, 24 miscegenation, 12, 33, 36–37, 48, 87 Misel, Bessie, 29

Index

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Mitchell, Louise, 66 Modern Gallery, 103, 105–7, 108 Montague, Ward, 105 Monterey Museum of Art, 119, 149n14 Montgomery, Olen (Scottsboro Boy), 62, 69, 70 Montgomery, Violet, 62 Moorhouse, Lee Native American portrait styles, 25 photographic albums of, 25 WORKS: Nez Perce Chief Joseph Poses in Blanket Outdoors, 21, 23, 33 Tirzah Trask Umpqua Tribe, 25–26 Tumwater Falls on the Columbia River, 25 Wo-ho-pum, Cayuse Indian Woman, in Costume, 25, 26 Moors over Spain (The Moors Return) (Lozowick), 141n44 Morgan, John Pierpont (J. P.), 22 Morgan, Murray, 16 Morning at Sixth Avenue (Noda), 77 Morrow, Felix: Bonus Army, The, 142n58 Mr. President: Free the Scottsboro Boys! (Dreiser), 72 Mugonkan (Museum of Silence), 145n26 Museum of Modern Art (Kamakura, Japan), 140n21 Museum of Modern Art (Wakayama, Japan), 133n6, 138n1, 140n21 Music (Hayakawa), 101, 117, 118, 119 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 64, 71–72 Nahl, Perham W., 108 Native Americans Americanization and assimiliation policies, 33–35 anti-miscegenation laws, 36 forced relocation and confinement policies, 12, 16, 34 photography of, 9, 12, 20–27, 33–37 Nazism, 121, 128 Nedashkovsky, Nicolai, 108 “Negro and Communism, The” (Du Bois article in Crisis), 71 Negro Soldiers (Johnson, M. G. with Richardson), 60 Neuhaus, Eugen, 99

New Deal programs, 39, 67, 75, 115 New Masses (magazine) African American representations, 56–57, 59, 61, 62, 73–74, 74 art style descriptions and debates, 55, 57, 58, 58, 59 Asian American illustrators, 55–57 civil rights discourses, 64, 142n58 covers, 56, 61, 73, 74 criticism of, 57–59 editors of, 90 Scottsboro commentary, 73–74 New Mexico Museum of Art (NMMA), 110, 120, 121, 121, 123 New Negro, 129 New York Times (newspaper), 71 Nez Perce Chief Joseph Poses in Blanket Outdoors (Moorhouse), 21, 23, 33 Niendorff, Arthur, 86 Noda, Hideo artist collective memberships of, 2 artistic influences on, 79 art specialties, 75, 81, 144n17 art style descriptions, 78, 79 associates of, 84–85 background and family, 81, 83, 93 death of, 89, 91, 131 education, 2, 75, 83, 84, 86 espionage activities, 89–91 exhibitions featuring, 59, 77–78, 86, 90, 109, 129 fresco demonstrations, 145n28 marriage, 87–89 mural projects, 2, 75, 77, 85–86 museum acquisitions of artworks by, 78, 130, 145n26, 155n9 residences and studios of, 146n45, 147n50 scholarly studies on, 3, 81 visual art grants honoring, 130 WORKS: Break Up, 77 Chaotic Age, 77–78 Demonstration, 77 Early Spring, 86 Easy Winter, 77, 83 Entrance to Subway, 93, 94 Girl In A Train, 86 Girl in Car, 81, 82 Inside of a Bus, 93, 94, 95 Milk Wagon, 147n51 Index

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Noda, Hideo (continued) Morning at Sixth Avenue, 77 On the Grass in Mill Valley, 83, 84 Painting, 147n51 Portrait of a Girl, 77 Portrait of Uchida, 83–84, 84 San Francisco, 86 School Life (Piedmont High School mural), 84, 85, 89, 130, 130 Scottsboro Boys (Alabama), 75–81, 76, 89, 91–93 Shoeshine Man, 95, 95 Street at the End of Year (The Hope of the Winter), 93, 93 Street Scene, 78, 129 Two Children, 81, 83, 83 Two Children in a Baby Buggy, 83 Way Home, 90 Winter in a City, 91, 92 Woodstock Art Gallery, 87, 87 Noda, Ruth, 87–89, 126 Noda Fund, 130 Noguchi, Isamu: Death, 61 Nomiyama, Koichi, 107 Nomura, Kenjiro, 107 Noose, The (Hishigaki, E.), 58, 62 Norris, Clarence (Scottsboro Boy), 69, 70, 73, 74, 142–43n3 North American Indian, The (Curtis), 22, 23, 24 Nude (Hayakawa), 106 nudity, symbolism of, 25, 40, 44, 66 Nuns and Flappers (Ishigaki, E.), 47 Oakland Art Gallery Annual Exhibitions, 107, 122, 150n28, 152n50 Oakland Art League, 113, 122, 150n28 Obata, Chiura, 99, 107, 108, 121, 153n60 Okami, Masashi, 14 Okanogan Baseball Team vs. Mission Team (Matsura), 26, 27 Okanogan Fourth of July Parade, John C. Schaller’s Bakery Float (Matsura), 18, 19 Okanogan Scrapbook (Matsura), 17, 17 Okubo, Benji, 113 Oldfield, Helen, 103 Oldfield, Otis William artist collective galleries cofounded by, 103, 105–6 exhibitions featuring, 120, 149n17 museum acquisitions of artwork by, 129 176

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Portrait of Yun Gee, 103, 105 students of, 6, 103 One Afternoon (Hayakawa) composition and description, 113, 116, 117–19 exhibitions of, 113, 120, 121–22, 123, 151n32, 152n47, 153n63 model identification, 119–20 On the Grass in Mill Valley (Noda), 83, 84 On The Shores of Clear Lake (Curtis), 25 Oriental Art Exhibit, 113 Oriental Art Exhibition group, 126 Orientalism, 4 Others/otherness, 3–4, 6, 20, 95. See also exclusionism; racism Pacific Citizen (newspaper), 126 Painters and Sculptors of Southern California (LACMA exhibition), 113, 120 Painting (Noda), 147n51 Paintings by Ishigaki (exhibition), 141n35 Paintings by New York Chinese-Japanese Artists (exhibition), 127–28 Pascoe, Peggy, 36 Patterson, Haywood (Scottsboro Boy) artwork featuring, 73, 74, 75, 79–80 group photographs with, 70 Scottsboro case descriptions, 69–72 Paul Elder Gallery, 103 Peace Policy, 16 Penny Musician (Ishigaki, E.), 47 Perez, Andrea, 138n77 Perez, Tony: Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum Cuts, with Khan, 92–93 Perez v. Sharp, 36 photography. See also portrait photography paradoxical nature of, 19–20 photojournalism and documentary styles of, 17 pictorialism in, 22, 136n42 self-portraits and performance, 11 traditional landscape aesthetic styles, 17–18 visual embodiment strategies, 11 photogravure printing, 22 Photo-Secession, 22 pictorialism, 22 Piedmont High School, 83, 84, 85, 89, 130, 130 Pierson, Pierre-Louis, 11 Pietà compositions, 44

Index

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Polo (Coit Tower mural) (Terada), 84, 146n36 Pommer, Julius, 105 Portrait (Hayakawa), 106, 120, 121, 122, 152n50 Portrait of a Girl (Noda), 77 Portrait of a Negro (Hayakawa) companion painting depicting artist painting, 101, 103, 104 composition and description, 96, 100–101, 119 dating and provenance, 100 exhibition labels and artist’s address, 103, 122 museum acquisition of, 97 online publicity of, 97 Portrait of a Young Man (Hayakawa), 113, 118 Portrait of Uchida (Noda), 83–84, 84 Portrait of Yun Gee (Oldfield, O. W.), 103, 105 portrait paintings and drawings African American racism: and commentary, 72–74, 75, 79–80; and criticism of, 66–67 of African Americans (see Portrait of a Negro) of Asian artists, 103, 125 of Asian men, 83–84, 101, 103, 113 connection/openness, 117, 119, 125 expense of, 19 introspection/detachment, 101, 103, 110 of young men, 101, 108, 112, 125 portrait photography authorial participation practices, 9, 12, 26–27, 31–33, 35–37 cross-dressing, 32 gender role fluidity, 31–32 of Native Americans, 9, 12, 20–27, 33–37 popularity of, 19 self-portraits: and cross-cultural identities, 35–36; and performance, 11; and personal presentation in, 21 Powell, Josephine, 62 Powell, Ozie, 62, 69 Powell v. Alabama, 71 Prashad, Vijay, 45 Pratt, Richard H., 35 Price, Ruth, 50 Price, Victoria, 69 Processional—1925 (Ishigaki, E.), 46, 47 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), 75, 115 Quiet, Walter, 142n58

racial art, 121, 128–29 racism. See also Scottsboro Boys anti-Asian, 4, 108 anti-immigration legislation, 3–4, 6–7, 107 anti-miscegenation laws, 36–37 anti-Semitism, 71 in art, 107–8, 121, 128–29 art criticism and, 66–67 citizenship restrictions, 16, 60, 121 civil rights discourses, 64 education restrictions, 109–10 employment restrictions, 60, 67, 127 heroic defiance themes, 58, 60–62, 64, 66 Native American imagery and power relations, 25–26, 26–27 Native Americans and government policies, 12, 16, 33–35 socioeconomic inequality, 92–93 vigilante violence motifs symbolizing, 58, 61, 62, 73 wartime relocations and internment camps, 98, 100 worldwide campaigns of, 121 Raymond, Harry, 64 “Recollections of Noda Hideo” (Terada), 84 Reimer, Rudolph, 144n18 Relief Appropriation Bill, 127 Resistance (Ishigaki, E.), 52, 52 Resistance of Woman (Ishigaki, E.), 52 Restless Wave (Ishigaki, A.), 50–51 Revolt on the Island of Cuba (Ishigaki, E.), 55, 55, 59–60 revolutionary art, 58, 78–80 Richardson, Earle W.: Negro Soldiers, with M. G. Johnson, 60 Ricketts, Edward F., 153n55 Rivera, Diego assistants of, 2, 75, 86 WORKS: Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, The, 75, 86 Man at the Crossroads (Rockefeller mural), 2, 75, 86 Roberson, Willie (Scottsboro Boy), 69, 70, 80 Robinson, Grace, 140n24 Roe, JoAnn, 2–3, 12, 134n5 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 39, 67, 72, 75, 115 Roosevelt, Theodore, 22, 36 Index

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Russian constructivism, 58 Russo-Japanese War, 15, 32

Seattle Camera Club, 22 Second Jury Free Exhibition of the Work by Members of East West Art Society in San Salon of Independent Artists, 128 Francisco Museum of Art, 108–9, 151n37 same-sex relations, 31–32 Sekula, Allan, 19, 20 samurai class, 13–14 Self-Portrait (Ishigaki, E.), 46 San Francisco (Noda), 86 Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (Bayard after San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) Daguerre), 20 awards, 86 SFAA. See San Francisco Art Association exhibitions of, 77, 99, 106, 107, 113 Shahn, Ben, 86, 145n27 Hayawaka grant-in-aid competition letter Sharp, Perez v., 36 to, 126 Sheffer, Jolie A., 36 members of, 125 Sherman, John Loomis, 90 San Francisco Art Institute. See California Shimooka, Renjō, 14 School of Fine Arts Shinano Drawing Museum, 145n26 San Francisco Japanese Artist Association, Shoeshine Man (Noda), 95, 95 109, 113 Siegel, William, 61 San Francisco Museum of [Modern] Art, 2, “Siege of the Capital, The” (Raymond), 64 107, 108–9, 120, 151n37 Singal, Daniel Joseph, 5 San Francisco Society of Women Artists, 113 Siperin, Mitchell: Southern Holiday, 61 Sanger, Margaret Higgins, 48, 50 slavery, 35 Santa Fe East Gallery, 98, 99 Sloan, John, 47, 86, 144n20 Santa Fe War Relocation Center, 98 Smedley, Agnes, 50 Schaller, Mathilda, 13, 13, 27, 29, 29, 31 socialism, 45, 47 Schapiro, Meyer, 87–88, 89, 90–91, 128 social realism, 39, 58, 78–80 School Life (Piedmont High School mural) Social Viewpoint in Art, The (exhibition), 59 (Noda), 84, 85, 89, 130, 130 Society of Independent Artists, 40, 140n21, Scottsboro, Alabama: A Story in Linoleum City 141n36 (Khan and Perez), 92–93 Soglow, Otto, 58 Scottsboro Boys Soldiers of People’s Front (Ishigaki, E.), 56, 57 arrests and trials, 69–71 solidarity and transracial alliances art protesting injustice, 72–74, 73, 74, African and Asian Americans, 42, 47, 77, 75–81, 76, 91 81 art reviews by mothers of, 62 economic, of laborers and artists, 48 legal representation, 71, 80 government employment exclusion protests, 127–28 news coverage, 70, 70–71, 80 international exposition exhibitions sup worldwide protest and support for, 72 porting racial, 120–21 Scottsboro Boys (Alabama) (Noda), 75–81, 76, Native American portraits and Asian 89, 91–93 American authorial participation as, Scottsboro Boys (Douglas), 74 36 Scottsboro Boys Must Not Die! (Child and Sonnenschein, Lillian, 84 Scottsboro Defense Committee pamphlet), 144n16 Southern Holiday (Siperin), 61 Scottsboro Legal Lynching—The Face of the Southern Holiday (Sternberg), 61, 74 NAACP, with the Arms of the Bosses South U.S.A. (Ku Klux Klan) (Ishigaki, E.), (Gellert), 74 56–57, 58, 62, 63 Scottsboro Limited (Hughes with Taylor bookSouvenir Album of Noted Indian Photographs let), 72–73, 73 (Moorhouse), 25 “Scottsboro Limited” illustration (Taylor), 72 Spanish Woman (Ishigaki, E.), 52 73, 73 Spirit of 1776, The (Ishigaki, E.), 66 178

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Index

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Stackpole, Ralph, 84, 86 Steinbeck, John, 153n55 Sternberg, Harry: Southern Holiday, 61, 74 Stieglitz, Alfred, 22 Stokes, Rose Pastor, 89, 91–92 Street at the End of Year (Noda), 93, 93 Street Scene (Noda), 78, 129 Strike Scene (Lozowick), 61–62 Strunksy, Leonore, 140n23 Strunsky, Albert, 48 Strunsky, Morris, 48 Strunsky Walling, Anna, 140n23 Sugimoto, Henry Yuzuru, 109, 121, 151n32, 153n60 Summer in Waldo (Hayakawa), 109 Sunrise and Telephone Pole (Matsura), 17–18, 18 surrealism, 79 Suzuki, Sakari, 107, 109 Taguchi, Unzō, 47 Takuji, Hatori, 81 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 20 Tamotzu, Chuzo, 126, 146n44 Tamotzu, Louise Kates, 146n44 Tanks #1 (The Tank) (Lozowick), 58, 58 Taylor, Prentiss booklet collaboration, 72–73 “8 Black Boys,” 73 “Scottsboro Limited,” 72, 73, 73 Tear Gas (Lozowick), 141n44 Terada, Edward Takeo associates of, 84, 90, 100 death, 147n51 exhibitions, 109, 151n32 Noda’s health decline, 91 residences, 147n51 Polo (Coit Tower mural), 84, 146n36 Thirtieth Annual Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors of the Southwest, 123 Timento, Susan, 8, 9, 11, 26–27, 33–37 “Tip of the Iceberg, The” (Wolf), 3, 40 Tirzah Trask Umpqua Tribe (Moorhouse), 25–26 Tobacco Workers Union, 143n7 Town (Ishigaki, E.), 46, 47 Toyotomi, Hideyoshi, 14 Trace, Marian, 105, 107 Treasury Relief Art Project, 75 Tulips (Hayakawa), 113, 122 Tumwater Falls on the Columbia River (Moorhouse), 25

Turner, Nathaniel, 66 Twenty-Second Nikka Exhibition, 90 Twit-mich or “Big Jim,” Charley Leo, Suzanne Leo, and “Little Joe” (Matsura), 20–21, 21 Two Children (Noda), 81, 83, 83 Two Children in a Baby Buggy (Noda), 83 Two Young Men Pose for Portraits at Mastura’s Studio (Matsura), 30, 31 Uchida, Yasuya (Kōsai), 83–84, 84 ukiyo-e prints, 18, 117 Umekubo, Masaki, 107, 151n31 Undefeated Arm (Ishigaki, E.), 56 Unemployment Demonstration (American Cossacks) (Ishigaki, E.), 55, 56, 59 universalism, 44, 128–29 University of California, Berkeley, 99, 106 Untitled (Female Nude) (Hayakawa), 110, 112 Untitled (Seated Female Nude) (Hayakawa), 110, 111 Untitled (Young Man Playing Ukulele) (Hayakawa), 101, 102, 110, 119 Uprising (Ishigaki, E.), 55, 59 Upton, Melville, 42 Usui, Bumpei, 144n20 Vanishing Race—Navaho, The (Curtis), 22, 23, 24 Virginia, Loving v., 36 “Visions and Transgressions” (Harpster), 134n5 visual embodiment, 11 Waldorf, Dolores, 108–9 Ward, Lynd, 128 War Tractor (Ishigaki, E.), 40, 41 Washington, George, 66 Washington Kloochman (Matsura), 21 Way Home (Noda), 90 Weems, Charles (Scottsboro Boy), 69, 70 Wells, H. G., 50, 72 West as America, The (exhibition), 129 Whipping (The Whip) (Ishigaki, E.), 53–55, 54, 58, 64 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 18 Whitney Museum of American Art, 2, 78, 129 Wilkins, Ralph, 108 Wilkins, Roy, 64 William Ford (Hayakawa), 125, 125 Williams, Eugene (Scottsboro Boy), 69, 70 Index

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Wiltz, Arnold, 86 Winter in a City (Noda), 91, 92 Witness (Chambers), 147n53 Wo-ho-pum, Cayuse Indian Woman, in Costume (Moorhouse), 25, 26 Wolf, Tom, 3, 40 Wolff, Janet, 4 Woman in Drag Sits on a Stoop and Smokes Cigar (Matsura), 32, 32 Woman Sewing (McCrossen), 106 women in society art exhibition inclusion, 106–7 birth control advocacy, 48, 50 cross-dressers, 32 interracial marriage, 12, 33, 36–37, 48, 87 Ishigaki’s views on American, 51–52 love triangle scandals, 48 Matsura’s view on Japanese, 32 same-sex relationships, 31–32 womens’ rights advocates, 50, 91–92 workers’ rights advocates, 91–92 Wong, Tyrus, 113 Woodstock Art Gallery, 86, 87

180

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Woodstock Art Gallery (Noda), 87, 87 Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, 155n9 Worker (Boy Sawing) (Hayakawa), 118, 119, 119 Works, Don, 105 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 39, 60, 67, 127–28, 144n18 World War I, 60. See also Bonus Army World War II, 98, 107, 121, 126 Wright, Andy (Scottsboro Boy), 69, 70 Wright, Leroy “Roy” (Scottsboro Boy), 69, 70, 70, 80–81 Yakima Indian Girl (Hayakawa), 99 Young Man, A (Hayakawa), 99, 101, 108 Zero Hour, The (Ishigaki, E.), 56, 57 Zetkin, Clara, 89, 91, 92

Index

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Typeset by Regina Starace Printed and bound by Oceanic Graphic International Composed in Baskerville 10 and Trade Gothic Next Printed on Neo Matte Art Bound in JHT

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