Tokio Ueyama and Colorado's Granada Relocation Center on View at Denver Art Museum
By Chadd Scott on
Anti-Japanese racism in America following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by imperial Japan resulted in one of the nation’s most disgraceful chapters. Under the excuse of “national security,” roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans, 79,000 of them U.S. citizens, were identified by the government, given six days to put their affairs in order – sell houses, close businesses, contact family – collect what few possessions they could carry with them, then rounded up and sent to remote military zones, mostly across the West. Anyone at least 1/16th Japanese was taken.
Officially termed “relocation centers,” the prisoners were held in concentration camps. That’s what you call places where innocent civilians with no charges made against them are forcibly removed to and held against their will, indefinitely, in miserable conditions, behind barbed wire and under armed guard. No rights. No freedom.
The Nazi camps were death camps; the American camps were concentration camps. Language matters to history.
Tokio Ueyama, Untitled (barracks with basketball hoop), 1944. Oil on canvas; 18 × 24 in. Courtesy Japanese American National Museum Gift of Kayoko Tsukada, 92.20.7. © Estate of Tokio Ueyama.
One of these camps was known as Amache, near Granada, CO, 220 miles southeast of Denver. One of the prisoners there was Tokio Ueyama (1889 – 1954).
The Denver Art Museum debuted an exhibition of Ueyama’s paintings on July 28, 2024. The show has been organized and curated by DAM’s Director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, JR Henneman. It will be on view in the museum’s Western American Art Gallery, alongside the Taos Founders, Frederic Remington, the “cowboys and Indians” stuff.
Why does the Denver Art Museum consider Ueyama, who was born in Japan and didn’t move to the U.S. until he was 18 years old, a “Western” artist?
“He's a West Coast artist, and we embrace ‘West’ as a very broad definition that includes diverse geographies and ethnicities,” Henneman said. Ueyama immigrated to San Francisco where he took art classes, and was working as an artist in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood when he was interned. “Secondly, he has a direct tie to Colorado history and art history because of his forcible relocation to Colorado from 1942 to ’45.”
The Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum has increasingly collected work by Japanese American artists over the past few years; this, however, will be the first exhibition dedicated to a Japanese American artist and the first time the museum will tell the story of Amache within the scope of an exhibition.
“The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama,” on view through June 1, 2025, makes a bold statement about DAM’s perspective on “the West.”
“The Petrie Institute, since its founding in 2001, has always taken an expansive perspective on who, what, and where the West is. The American West is a place, and for many of us it is home, but its boundaries are porous and ever changing,” Henneman explained. “However, it is more than a geographical location. It is an idea. It is a myth that impacts our national history, but transcends it as well. We believe in taking a broad embrace of the definition of the West and ‘Western’ so that we can place the American West in a global context – in which it is absolutely a part – and also so that we can tell the story of American art from a Western perspective.”
A West beyond the cliches. Beyond the spurs and chuck wagons of John Wayne. Beyond the gunfights and horses and mountain peaks.
“The West is an expansive place of inspiration and diversity. It always has been, and there's no reason why we need to try to fit it into a confined box now,” Henneman added. “The West has never been a static place, and we hope never will be, and we want to be a part of that dynamism. I think expansiveness is a perfect word for this.”
An expansive perspective on the West more art institutions are taking, including stories of Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Latinx Americans and Chicanos across the region. Stories essential to any understanding of the massive “West” beyond the bunkhouse.
Tokio Ueyama, Self Portrait, July 1943. Oil on canvas; 18 × 16 in. Bunkado, Inc. © Estate of Tokio Ueyama. Photo by Joshua White. Image courtesy Bunkado, Inc.
Beauty as Resistance
More than 10,000 people were unconstitutionally incarcerated at Amache, making it the 10th largest “city” in Colorado at the time. Ueyama was there with his wife.
At Amache, and the other camps around the country, something amazing happened: art.
Elders with training and expertise taught art classes. Ueyama did. Prisoners with and without experience learned.
Famed American furniture maker George Nakashima (1905 – 1990) improved his technique learning from a master Japanese woodcarver at the Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964) was similarly imprisoned there and produced dramatic paintings of the experience. As did Jishiro Miyauchi at the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming.
And Ueyama at Amache.
In conditions designed to break the spirit, how were these prisoners able to find – or keep – their artistic spirit?
“People had nothing to do. Many people did have opportunities to explore – for the first time in this case – art making, music, performance,” Henneman explained. “The War Relocation Authority, knowing that unrest and boredom would risk destabilizing these camps, they put into place multiple different programs, one of which was the adult education program at Amache. One of them was taking art classes with Tokyio Uyama and a number of other teachers; Uyama later said he thought he had about 150 adult students, and that the majority of them never tried painting before because hadn't had the time or the opportunity.”
Tokio Ueyama, The Evacuee, 1942. Oil on canvas; 24 × 30-14 in. Courtesy Japanese American National Museum Gift of Kayoko Tsukada, 92.20.3. © Estate of Tokio Ueyama.
“Art making in various forms created an important way to pass time. It became a truly necessary outlet for grappling with a time of trauma and a time without end – those who were incarcerated did not know when they would be allowed to return to their homes or leave camp boundaries,” Henneman continued. “There's a purgatory aspect to being in camps and I think working with art of different forms may have helped alleviate (that). Creating art becomes an important avenue for grappling with trauma, reasserting identity, channeling beauty in the face of challenge and hardship, just reaffirming basic humanity and not being bored out of your mind.”
Be careful, though, when considering Ueyama’s Amache artworks.
“The paintings that Ueyama created at Amache are beautiful, they are gorgeous and don't allude to the hardship of what life at Amache would have been like, and that's an important thing to keep in mind,” Henneman said. “When we're looking at any artworks produced in a context of duress like this, each artist will have a very different response to their environment. Just because Ueyama’s paintings are gorgeous, does not mean that his experience was a five-star hotel.”
Art as resistance. Beauty as resistance.
“He was keeping with his own practice and his philosophy about the importance of beauty in one's life, but it was also his way of maintaining and reasserting his artistry and the career he had worked decades to build in this challenging context,” Henneman added. “Channeling beauty in the way that Ueyama does is a survival and tactic. It doesn’t look like it right away, but it absolutely is given the context in which we know he was working.”
Upon their release from Amache in 1945, the Ueyamas returned to Los Angeles and founded the Bunkado gift shop selling Japanese items in the heart of Little Tokyo. The store continues thriving today. Ueyama remained active in the neighborhood’s art community until his death.
