Wendy Maruyama
San Diego, California
The Tag Project, 2012
paper, string, ink, and steel

The Tag Project is the first time I made the personal decision to really look at this sorry chapter in history as a Japanese-American artist. Some of the most iconic photos of the internment were taken by photographer Dorothea Lange, who was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the internment process. Her haunting photos of families, gathered with “only what they could carry” showed faces, young and old, apprehension and fear, tempered by smiles to ensure the children that everything will be okay. All of them were wearing tags bearing their names, assigned ID numbers, and designated final locations to their respective camps. The 120,000 tags represented lost dreams, shattered lives, and displaced individuals who were singled out for “looking like the enemy.”

The process of replicating these tags using government databases, writing thousands of names, numbers, and camp locations, became a meditative process.The hundreds of volunteers, like myself, as they wrote the name of an internee, could contemplate and wonder what this person was thinking as he or she was being moved from the comforts of home to the spare and bare prisons placed in the foreboding deserts and wastelands of America.

As I started to replicate the tags, I was taken by the actual physical weight of these tags when they were completed and hung: Despite appearing to be light and airy, they were very heavy and unwieldy. This struck me as being very relevant to the way the internment was perceived by the general American public. To this day, it shocks me to still run into fellow Americans who had no clue that this had happened. I feel that the sheer numbers and the scale of these tags will convey to all who view this that the internment was a massive project that was to impact an entire culture of people and their future generations.

The tags cascade downwards from 11 feet, and they give the appearance of ghostly figures that rustle and murmur asyou walk by. I see this work not only as an art project but as an advocacy tool, as well as one that brings communities together and serves as an educational project. Hopefully my art succeeds in melding the four areas of art, advocacy, education, and community.

Bio
Wendy Maruyama is Professor Emeritus of woodworking and furniture design in the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from San Diego State University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Maruyama has exhibited her work nationally, with solo shows in New York City, San Francisco, Scottsdale, Indianapolis, Savannah, and Easthampton. She has also exhibited in Tokyo, Seoul, and London. She has received several prestigious awards, including the California Civil Liberties Public Education Grant, several National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Visual Artists, the Japan/U.S. Fellowship, and a Fulbright Research Grant to work in the United Kingdom.

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