Artifacts of Loss - Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps (Electronic book text)

During World War II, over 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in concentration camps across America. In Artifacts of Loss, Jane E. Dusselier focuses the lens on the lives of these internees and the art they created. Their camp-made artistry included flowers formed from tissue paper and shells, wood carvings honoring pets they left behind, furniture crafted from discarded apple crates, gardens nurtured next to their housinganything to help alleviate their visual deprivation and isolation. Internees crafts were central to sustaining, re-forming, and inspiring new relationships. Creating, exhibiting, consuming, and living with art became the essence of everyday camp life and helped provide for mental, emotional, and psychic survival. Dusselier considers these often overlooked folk crafts as meaningful political statements, significant as material forms of protest and as representations of loss. She also sheds light on displaced people around the globe today and the ways in which personal and group identity is reflected in similar creative offerings.