I’ll be honest. When I first read the announcement for the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum’s next exhibition, one focused on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, I paused.
Japanese American incarceration? At the Holocaust Museum?
What the exhibition shows
Opening Jan. 17, “Resilience – A Sansei Sense of Legacy” brings together contemporary works by eight third generation Japanese American artists, using sculpture, photography and mixed media to explore how the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II continues to echo through families decades later.
That story begins in 1942. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered the forced removal of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. Many were American citizens. Families were incarcerated in remote camps as far east as Arkansas, losing their civil rights, their homes and their livelihoods along the way…