EDITORS ROBINSON, CREEF TO DISCUSS MINE OKUBO ANTHOLOGY MARCH 7

A special presentation of excerpts from the new anthology, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, will be presented by the book’s editors, Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef, at a public program set for Saturday, March 7, beginning at 2 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

The anthology is an examination of the life and works of artist Mine Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist and activist whose career defied gender and racial expectations. Okubo is best known for her book, Citizen 13660, first published in 1946. This landmark autobiography contained many of Okubo’s pen and ink sketches created during her unconstitutional World War II confinement with her family, first in the Tanforan racetrack and then the domestic concentration camp at Topaz, Utah.

While in the Topaz camp, Okubo taught art and oversaw a literary and art magazine. She also produced hundreds of paintings and sketches, some which were seen by the editors of Fortune magazine. That led to her release from camp and relocation to New York City, where she worked for the magazine as an illustrator and spent the rest of her life. Citizen 13660 has been in print for over 60 years and Okubo’s artistry remains highly influential today.

"To me life and art are one and the same," Okubo wrote, "for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless."

The anthology contains both color and halftone reproductions of Okubo’s works, some which have never been published before. It also features essays by artists and other interested individuals such as Laura Card, Fay Chiang, Vivian Fumiko Chin, Mary Curtin, Heather Fryer, Masumi Hayashi, Sohei Hohri, Lynne Horiuchi, Clemens Kalischer, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, James Masao Mitsui, Stella Oh, Kimberley L. Phillips, and Irene Poon.

Greg Robinson is a professor of history at the Université du Quebéc a Montréal and author of the book, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (2001). Elena Tajima Creef is associate professor of women's studies at Wellesley College and author of Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (2004). Both will be part of the program and will present excerpts from the anthology.

This program is free to National Museum members or with admission. To make reservations, call the Japanese American National Museum at (213) 625-0414. For more information, go to www.janm.org.