She supported herself as an illustrator in New York City. Eventually she devoted herself full time to her art; her painting style became playful, almost childlike, incorporating pictographs, bright colors and round-faced characters, as in “Boy, Rooster, Cat” (1964) and “Boy, Goat, Fruit” (before 1972). Her first solo exhibition was at the Oakland Museum in 1972.
Because Hibi and her family could not secure employment outside the West Coast — a condition the government set for release of those who were incarcerated — they were some of the last people to depart Topaz. They too moved to New York, where Hibi sustained her family by working as a seamstress, while continuing to paint. She and her husband were both diagnosed with cancer shortly after their release; he died in 1947, and she was left to raise their children.
She eventually moved back to San Francisco, in 1954, where she worked in a garment factory and then as a housekeeper to a socialite artist. The mood of her paintings seemed to lift in the California sun. Works like “Poems by Madame Takeko Kujo” — made in 1970, the year of her first solo exhibition — are done in a light-filled, lyrical, almost fully abstract style that incorporates delicate calligraphy.
That this exhibition exists at all is a small miracle, because much of the work made by these painters before 1942 is difficult to track down — Hibi and her husband entrusted their work with a friend when they had to leave their home, and it was eventually lost; much of Hayakawa’s disappeared into unrecorded private collections. But what the curator, ShiPu Wang, has managed to assemble is a revelation, not least because it’s an important reminder, as the incoming presidential administration talks of mass deportations of immigrants and the end of birthright citizenship, of an earlier moment in this country’s history — and of the artists who recorded it, and survived.
Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi and Miné Okubo
Through Aug. 17. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets, N.W., Washington, D.C.; 202-633-7970; americanart.si.edu.
