Title:
At Night
Creator/Contributor:
Hibi, Hisako
Date:
12/1/1944
Identifier:
98.138.8
Format:
painting
oil on canvas
Description:
Unframed, stretched canvas. Image of barracks at night. 2 barracks in foreground. yellow colored windows of glowing light.
Yellow crescent moon plus one yellow star in TL. 3 smoke stacks emerging from barracks. The smoke stack CL is emitting gray
stream of smoke.
Historical Note:
One of eight Hisako Hibi paintings from Topaz that had been previusly believed to be lost. Hisako Hibi (1907-1991) was born
in a village near Kyoto and immigrated to the United States in 1920. She studied art at the California School of Fine Arts
and participated in annual exhibitions of the San Francisco Art Association. She taught art during her incarceration in Tanforan
and Topaz. Hibi resettled in New York City where she continued to paint while working as a dressmaker, domestic, and factory
worker to support her two children. She moved back to San Francisco in 1954. The work for which she is most noted is that
which captures various domstic scenes within camp. Over the course of her lifetime, her work evolved from landscapes, images
from the internment camps, and her life after the war in New York to explorations in abstraction and interpretations of spiritual
realities. She is certainly one of the more "canonical" of the Japanese American painters, and her work is both well-known
and highly regarded among various artistic circles. A substantial collection of her work also exists at the Special Collections
Dept. at UCLA.
Subject:
Concentration Camps, Topaz | barracks