Mistaken Identities

Expand

IIIFView PDF

Mistaken Identities

Artist Roger Shimomura (American, born 1939)

Publisher Lawrence Lithography Workshop

Date2005

Dimensions(Image) H: 10 1/2 in. (26.7 cm); W: 9 in. (22.9 cm)

MediumPortfolio, suite of 6 lithographs.

ClassificationPrints

Credit LineFrederick B. and Kate L. Shoemaker Fund and Museum Purchase, by exchange

Object number

2006.59E

Not on View

Label TextRoger Shimomura’s art explores the misconceptions and bigotry that enabled the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, including himself, in internment camps during World War II. In this portfolio, he derives his compositions from two sources: paintings made by interned artists like Masao Mori and documentary photographs taken for the United States War Relocation Authority, including those by Ansel Adams. In Shimomura’s reimagining of these source images, only subtle details like the barbed wire in For Masao Mori signify the confined location. Representative of his approach, he utilizes lithography to combine elements of American Pop Art, with its relationship to colorful, cartoon-based imagery, and the Japanese woodblock print genre ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”). He portrays the incarcerated figures in traditional Japanese dress and style to indicate many Americans’ tendency to view Americans of Asian descent as foreign, a mindset that continues today.