Botanic Garden exhibit reveals mystery, beauty of photo in time of war
The mystery began with an old black-andwhite photograph taken in February 1944.
The photo was made at an art exhibit at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. There are five people in the photograph.
Sarah Wilkerson Freeman, a history professor who found the photograph in 2013, was able to identify four of them right away.
One couple was Henry Sugimoto, a Japanese artist, and his wife, Susie.
The Sugimotos were among thousands of Japanese-Americans held at internment camps in the Arkansas Delta towns of Jerome and Rowher during World War II.
Sugimoto’s paintings of life in the camps have become iconic representations of a shameful chapter of U.S. history.
One of Sugimoto’s paintings, “Arrival at Jerome,” is prominent in the background of the photograph.
The other couple in the photo was Louis Freund, who ran the art department at Hendrix, and his wife, Elsie, who taught there.
Hendrix hosted an exhibit of Sugimoto’s somber paintings in 1944, a year before the war was over.
“The period of Japanese American relocation was a sad one for all of us at Hendrix College,” Freund wrote in a 1982 letter, “and the month long Sugimoto exhibit was not only respected by the citizens of Conway but given good marks for its obvious artistic quality.”
The photograph stirred Freeman’s historical curiosity for a number of reasons.
It was taken in the midst of the war, barely a year after President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the forcible removal of 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.
Why would a small Arkansas college host an exhibit by an interned Japanese artist whose somber work portrayed life in an Arkansas camp behind barbed wire?
And who was the fifth person in the photo — the tall, slender, well-dressed woman standing in the middle?
“She was clearly the center of the photograph’s attention, so she was there for a reason,” said Freeman, who teaches at Arkansas State University. “I needed to know the reason.” Freeman kept digging. The Sugimotos and their 6-year-old daughter, Madeleine, were sent to the Jerome camp in 1942, then to Rowher in 1944.
Soon after arriving at Jerome, Sugimoto began painting what he saw on sheets, pillowcases and scraps of paper, canvas and metal.
Sugimoto was a noted Japanese artist before the war, but how did Hendrix know he was in a camp 150 miles away? Why did he care?
Freeman kept digging.
The 1944 photo had been taken by Paul Faris, who taught English and photography at Hendrix.
In 1945 Faris and his wife, Ann, who later worked for the Memphis PressScimitar, were allowed to visit, photograph and interview Japanese at the camps.
Their documentary work was largely lost to history until 2012. That’s when their surviving children, Mary Jane and Tim, both of Memphis, contacted Freeman.
Among the documents, Freeman found references to Floy K. Hanson, another member of the art department at Hendrix.
Hanson grew up in Memphis and attended the Jenny M. Higbee School. Her favorite class was art, taught by Jessie Clough.
After Hanson graduated in 1895, she studied art in Chicago and New York and developed a passion for the Japanese-influenced work of artist Arthur Dow.
When Clough moved to New York, she and Hanson opened their own studio and began to study art around the world.
They visited Japan several times and collected thousands of materials and objects, including 300 Japanese prints.
Their collection of Asian woodcut prints, porcelains, fabrics and other objects can be found today at the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College.
Hanson continued to visit Japan, even after she moved back to Memphis in 1924 to teach art at Miss Hutchison’s School.
“Floy Hanson fell in love with the beauty of Japan, its people, its culture,” Freeman said.
“That love influenced her the rest of
her life. She was devastated by Pearl Harbor, but she never lost sight of the beauty of the Japanese people she knew.”
Hanson started teaching at Hendrix in the late 1930s. She brought her collection of Japanese arts and crafts with her and curated an exhibit at the college.
Floy Hanson was the fifth person in the photograph.
“Miss Floy Hanson was responsible for searching out and arranging the exhibit of Henry Sugimoto’s work at Hendrix College,” Freund wrote in his 1982 letter.
“During Ms. Hanson’s lifetime, she kept up a correspondence with the Sugimotos and shared her letters with my wife and me. Unfortunately, we have lost contact with them, but we are glad to know their struggles have not been forgotten.”
Hanson died in 1950, Faris in 1988, Sugimoto in 1990 and Freund in 1999.
Their beautiful art and friendship live on in a new exhibit called “Beauty in a War Torn World.” The exhibit, curated by Freeman, is on display until March 31 at the Memphis Botanic Garden.
By the way, Sugimoto’s painting, “Arrival at Jerome,” is still on display at Hendrix College.
The college’s current president is William Tsutsui, a JapaneseAmerican.
Reach columnist David Waters at david.waters@commercialappeal.com.