2019 Day of Exile: Commemoration & Art Installation (Commemorate the Day All Japanese Americans on Vashon Forced to Leave)NEW

Mukai Farm & Garden is hosting a special open house to honor the Day of Exile to commemorate the day all the Japanese Americans on Vashon were forced under armed escort to leave the island on May 16, 1942.

The community is invited to attend the installation of the commemorative art “Nisei Trilogy” by award winning artists, Lawrence Matsuda and Roger Shimomura, both of whom were imprisoned at Minidoka, and poetry reading by Larry Matsuda.

The artists had collaborated to create the Nisei Trilogy, a joint project by Matsuda and Shimomura that reveals the Nisei experience of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, life in the internment camps, and the return home to hostile American communities. The artist Shimomura took inspiration from Matsuda’s poetry to create three images incorporating Matsuda’s poetry.

“They took us and we didn’t want to go and when the war was ending they released us and we had no where to go,” Hanae Matsuda told her son Lawrence, who had been born in the Minadoka internment camp in 1945.

The Friends of Mukai are honored to receive this gift from the artists, a set of limited edition prints which are also shown at University of Washington’s Suzzallo Library, The Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, and Portland State University. The Trilogy will remain on permanent display in the Mukai house.

Join the Friends of Mukai for the Day of Exile Commemoration and Art Installation on Sunday, May 19, 2-4pm.

The house opens at 1pm and the program starts at 2pm.