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TITLE "My Santa Anita Barrack Room" DESCRIPTION "My Santa Anita Barrack Room" Watercolor, by Lili Yuri Sasaki CONTEXT "Most of the people were making idealistic paintings -- Japanese looking like this and holding their hands uo to the clouds, or the little child there showing that we were looking for hope, that kind of thing. But they weren't making it very realistic. I wanted something to show exactly what kind of camp we were in. So that's why I painted that one. So I'd remember. I tried to make my room look pretty. Everybody did that. The walls were just bare wood. I knew that we were going to be sent to another camp. I thought I wanted to have something to remember exactly what my room was like and what I had in there....And that's exactly the way it was -- white wood, cots put together, bed spread, so I painted everything. From the little bed there, you could take four little stpes and then there were steps to go down and you were out. So that's exactly what it looked like, and I'm glad I did it. Just the same coloring, and every knothole that was in there." Lili Sasaki, in Beyond Words: Images From America's Concentration Camps CREDIT Lili Yuri Sasaki Courtesy of Cornell University Press DATE ca. 1942 |
