Floating Clouds by Hisako Hibi

In today’s episode we look at “Floating Clouds” by Hisako Hibi, one of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in prison camps on the West Coast during WWII. Paintings like this served as the only visual record of life in the camps as well as a way for prisoners to deal with the harsh conditions.

We’ll find out how she and her family were able to build a new life after the war and how she persevered through her art and with the help of fellow immigrants.   

If you want to follow along, you can find it here on the Museum’s site.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/

EPISODE MUSIC
“Timeless One” by Solas Composer
https://soundcloud.com/solas_composer/timeless-one

“Eastern Thought” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html

Artwork information
Hisako Hibi https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/floating-clouds-119617

Detention camp paintings
https://janm.emuseum.com/groups/hisako-hibi-collection/results

Hisako Hibi info
https://americanart.si.edu/artist/hisako-hibi-33445

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisako_Hibi

https://americanart.si.edu/blog/japanese-american-artists-hibi

https://www.becomingvisible.si.edu/stories/hisako-hibi

https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/hisako-hibis-work-artist-was-almost-lost

Hibi memoir
“Peaceful Painter: Memoirs of an Issei Woman Artist”
https://archive.org/details/peacefulpainterm0000hibi/page/32/mode/2up

Exhibition info
Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!

Ready? Then let’s head to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at Floating Clouds by Hisako [Hee-SAH-ko] Hibi. If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com forward slash clouds. 

So what do you first notice? 

Fluffy grey-white clouds drift over the rooftops of three buildings in this almost square oil painting. 

The buildings are sharply cut off by the bottom and sides of the canvas and turned a little to our left. They’re positioned one behind the other and fill the bottom third of the scene. 

We see only their peaked roofs, a narrow slice of the walls facing us and the triangular side walls angled back and to our right. The sides facing us are terracotta orange while the right-hand walls are coffee brown. 

The grey-green roofs have swipes of tan, beige,and pine green mixed in and are topped with a brick red chimney and two brown smokestacks. Warm sunlight from the left creates a deep shadow on the right of the chimney and under the eaves. 

The tall sky fills the rest and is divided into three blurry layers–milky white just above the roofs, then a band of pale blue with wisps of teal green and lavender, and at the top is a band of dark denim blue. 

The white clouds have touches of straw yellow and rose pink with shades of grey defining their puffy or elongated contours.

The paint looks like it’s applied very thinly and the whole scene is made with simple flat shapes, there’s no detail aside from the shadows. The impression I get as I look at this is peaceful but anonymous. 

MUSIC

This peaceful view hides a terrible history. 

Those simple buildings were a prison for Hibi, her husband, children and thousands of other Japanese Americans who were rounded up and incarcerated in 1942. The horrifying attack by the Japanese military on Pearl Harbor in 1941 caused the US to declare war on Japan, so any Japanese American was now considered an enemy. 

President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 declaring that all Japanese Americans up and down the West Coast were to be forced from their homes and sent to prison camps. 

Before this, Hisako and her family were enjoying success as Issei, first generation Japanese immigrants. 

She was born Hisako Shimizu [She MEE zu] in a small village in 1907, the oldest of six kids. By 1920, she and her parents had moved to the US, settling in Los Angeles and her father started a business. In just 5 years, he’d been so successful, he decided to move the family back to Japan. But Hisako refused because she knew she’d get stuck raising her five siblings if she went back. 

So she stayed! She was completely on her own, only 18 yrs old, spoke only limited English but finished high school and went on to study at the Calif. School of Fine Arts. 

She met another artist there, Matsusaburo George Hibi and after they graduated, got married and had two children, a son Satoshi, also called Tommy and daughter Ibuki. They moved to Hayward, CA and her husband set up shop teaching Japanese language and art classes. 

When the family was forced to leave their home they were sent to a camp called Tanforan Assembly Center which was a former racetrack. So everyone had to live in the old horse stables. 

The detainees weren’t allowed cameras so paintings like this became the only record of life in the camps. George and his friend and fellow artist Chiura [hoo-roh] Obata opened an art school to give the children something enjoyable to do and to just help their mental health. Pretty soon the adults were signing up too for classes in painting, ink drawing, architectural drafting, and fashion design. 

The school was re-established when they were all moved to Topaz, a detention camp in the high desert of Utah. Topaz was huge with more than 11,000 prisoners. 

Floating Clouds is one of 70 works HIsako painted while incarcerated. Years later, when Smithsonian curator Melissa Ho was shown the work by Ibuki, she found that Hisako had written on the back, “Free, free, I want to be free; free as the clouds I see above Topaz.” 

MUSIC 

Topaz closed after three and a half years and the Hibis moved to New York in 1945. Sadly, George died a couple years later, so Hisako found work as a seamstress in a garment factory. 

In her memoir she describes being one of thousands of dressmakers in this huge factory in the Garment District. And how her Italian immigrant colleagues helped her learn the ropes and adjust to the fast pace. They taught her Italian songs like Mama Mia which they’d sing while the machinery whirred around them. 

She was able to resume painting by taking lessons at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1953, she became a US citizen and she and Ibuki moved back to San Francisco. By this time her son, Tommy had joined the Air Force. 

Hisako ended up working as a housekeeper for Helen Salz, one of the founders of the Presidio Open Air School who provided her with studio space. She began exhibiting throughout the Bay Area and joined groups like San Francisco Women Artists. Her reputation began to grow as galleries featured her in solo shows starting in the 70s up through the 90s and she was given an Award of Honor by the SF Arts Commission. 

Hisako passed away in 1991 and her daughter published her memoir “Peaceful Painter: Memoirs of an Issei Woman Artist.” At the end, she talks about her life back in San Francisco and says, “Now I feel reborn in the natural beauty of the Bay Area, where I had gone to school and married. I have two children and five grandchildren. Time heals wounds.” 

“Floating Clouds” is on tour as I record this in June 2024, but will return to the museum in November as part of an exhibition called Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo featuring the work of two other women artists in the camps. The show is a welcome introduction to the work of these women who have so long been under the radar. 

You can find info about the exhibition and all the other sources for today’s episode in the show notes. My thanks to Curator Melissa Ho and the Densho organization for their help with today’s episode.  

OUTRO:

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

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Thanks for joining me!