The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has acquired a collection of artifacts that Japanese Americans produced while imprisoned in internment camps during World War II. A planned auction of about 450 pieces last month, at the auction house Rago in Lambertville, N.J., was canceled amid global social media protests.
The internees had given much of the material to Allen H. Eaton, a scholar who documented the miseries of camp life and the prisoners’ resilience in his 1952 book, “Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps,” with a foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt. Mr. Eaton had also planned to exhibit the pieces, which included family name plaques for barracks and watercolor scenes of interned children lugging suitcases.
The museum announced the acquisition at a benefit on Saturday night honoring the actor George Takei, known for playing Sulu on “Star Trek.” He had spent time in the camps as a child and helped negotiate to stop the auction.
“All of us can take to heart that our voices were heard and that these items will be preserved and the people who created them during a very dark period in our history will be honored,” Mr. Takei said in a statement.
The museum declined to disclose the purchase price; the high estimate for the Eaton collection, which Rago had divided into two dozen batches, was $27,900. The museum’s president, Greg Kimura, said that the transaction was “an amicable and mutually beneficial arrangement.”
The auction consignor, John Ryan, a Connecticut credit card marketing executive, inherited the pieces from his father, Thomas, a contractor who worked for the Eaton family. When the sale was announced, Japanese Americans found photos of their interned family members in the collection. Social media posts and a change.org petition described the auction as an effort to profit from the impoverishment and persecution of 120,000 people who were sent to the camps, including orphans who had not previously known that any of their ancestors were Japanese.
Mr. Ryan said in an interview, “We have tried to be good stewards of this material and protect it over the years.” He said that he had expected institutions to bid at the auction, and that the vociferous protests made him fear for his family’s safety.
The auction house said in a statement, “It’s truly fitting that this material will reside in perpetuity at an institution dedicated to sharing the Japanese American experience and based on the West Coast, the site of the evacuation.” The unanticipated controversy, the statement continued, could now “fuel a larger conversation about the marketplace for historical property associated with man’s inhumanity.”
- http://bit.ly/1PfTnjN
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu