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IU's College of Arts and Sciences' April 9 Food for Thought livestream features a conversation and Q&A with Osamu James Nakagawa, Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design.
During the presentation, Professor Nakagawa will share his artistic exploration of the legacy of Japanese American incarceration during World War 2. Eighty years after this painful chapter in American history, Nakagawa’s photographic trilogy “American Truths” – born of his 25,000-mile pilgrimage to the site of every incarceration camp in the U.S. – raises questions that have assumed renewed urgency.
Presentation Description
In February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, incarcerating approximately 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in camps across the U.S. Exactly eighty years later, Professor Osamu James Nakagawa, whose family had moved from Japan to the U.S. in the post-war boom era, set out on a nearly 25,000-mile pilgrimage to the sites of every incarceration camp. “American Truths,” the three-part body of work Nakagawa produced in response to this experience, uses experimental and alternative photographic methods to picture both the sites where the incarceration camps once were and the painful history this desolate landscape contains.
This presentation will feature a slideshow of Nakagawa’s images in the “American Truths” series, including iconic black-and-white portraits of the “Witness Trees” that mark the infamous sites as well as diptychs pairing cyanotypes with self-portraits in landscape, among other juxtapositions. A dual Japanese and American citizen, the artist will share how he came to learn about this enormity, why he eventually chose to reckon artistically with it, and the expressive challenge it presents.
Biography
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo. At 15, he moved back to the United States, settling in Houston, Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Thomas Houston in 1986, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Professor Nakagawa holds the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography position in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University in Bloomington. His accolades include the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year, and the 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. Nakagawa’s work has been showcased internationally, with notable solo exhibitions such as Witness Trees at PGI, Tokyo, in 2023; GAMA Caves at Sepia EYE, New York, in 2014; and the OKINAWA TRILOGY at Kyoto University of the Arts in 2013. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Tokyo Photographic Arts Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and others.
A link to the April 9 livestream will be provided upon registration.
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