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Peabody Essex Museum

Noguchi and Japanese American Internment During World War II

November 14

1:00pm - 3:00pm

Peabody Essex Museum, Morse Auditorium

East India Square,
161 Essex Street,
Salem, MA 01970

Speakers
Christina Hiromi Hobbs

Join curator and scholar Christina Hiromi Hobbs for a talk examining Isamu Noguchi’s voluntary incarceration at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona during World War II. Hobbs will discuss Noguchi’s complex motivations for entering the camp, discuss its impact on his life and work and examine the historical context of art making during Japanese American incarceration.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in internment camps created on U.S. soil. Many lived there for the duration of the war. Read more about their stories — and why their experiences still matter today — from the Densho documentation project and Poston Preservation.

This program is supported by the Lowell Institute. 

Image: Japanese Americans arrive at Poston, Arizona in May of 1942. Photo by Fred Clark. Courtesy of the National Archives.

Christina Hiromi Hobbs. Christina Hiromi Hobbs is a curator, writer and art historian based in the Bay Area. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Stanford University, focusing on modern and contemporary art of the Asian diaspora and the history of photography. Her recent projects include curating In the Presence Of: Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association at Berkeley Art Center (2024) and co-curating No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York (2022). She is a board member of the Toshiko Takaezu Foundation, Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages and Poston Community Alliance.
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