Takahashi Birds

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing the incarceration of people of Japanese descent on the west coast. More than two-thirds of the approximately 125,000 individuals incarcerated were US citizens.​​

Among them were Yoneguma and Kiyoka Takahashi, who learned bird woodcarving during their 3 1/2-year imprisonment in the Poston III Relocation Center in Arizona. After sourcing imagery from books, they fashioned birds from lumber scraps left over from the camp barracks’ hasty construction, unraveled window screen wire, twigs from the desert landscape, and watercolors. The Takahashis built their art into a successful business following their release from Poston.

Shown alongside their source images by Audubon—an immigrant who, through his Birds of America project, forged an identity as a quintessential American frontiersman—these brooches open thorny questions about “Americanness” and the equal rights of citizenship. 

Credit: Overview from museum website