Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani was a fiercely independent Japanese American artist who lost his family and friends to the United States incarceration camps during World War II and Hiroshima’s atomic bombing. He survived the trauma of those two significant events and homelessness by creating art every day. Mr. Mirikitani passed away at age 92 on October 21, 2012, in New York City. This remarkable exhibit about the art and life of Mr. Mirikitani is a poignant exploration of the lasting impacts of war and discrimination, and the healing power of creativity.
Born in 1920 in Sacramento, Mirikitani moved to Hiroshima, Japan, when he was four years old and returned to the United States shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He and his family were incarcerated at the Tule Lake, California, camp, and then at Crystal City, Texas. Read below for a more detailed biography of Mirikitani.
The exhibit is on loan from the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle.
OPENING EVENT:
Mimosas with Mirikitani
Join us for a film screening and the opening of our new special exhibit: The Art of Jimmy Mirikitani!
As part of its current special exhibit, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation will be holding a screening of The Cats of Mirikitani, a documentary film about the life of artist and incarceree Jimmy Mirikitani, on Saturday, January 17, at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center.
Guests of Mimosas with Mirikitani will enjoy light pastries and fruit, mimosas,* and a special screening of the documentary The Cats of Mirikitani. Visitors are invited to spend the morning exploring the exhibit and learning more about the life and art of Jimmy Mirikitani.
The event will begin at 10 a.m. with refreshments and a viewing of the new Art of Jimmy Mirikitani exhibit. It will be followed at 10:45 a.m. with a showing of the film inside the Mineta-Simpson Institute. The film will end shortly after noon.
Produced by Linda Hattendorf and Masa Yoshikawa, The Cats of Mirikitani details the many phases of Mirikitani’s life. Learn more by checking out the film’s website HERE.
Admission is $10 per person.
*Mimosas are for 21+ year old attendees
Full Biography:
Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani is an artist who was born in Sacramento California in 1920 and raised in Hiroshima Japan. At age 18, he returned to the United States to pursue a career in art and escape the growing militarism in Japan. He was living with his sister Kazuko and her family in Seattle when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Executive Order 9066 forced Jimmy and his sister out of their home in Seattle; they were sent to separate concentration camps hundreds of miles apart. Kazuko was sent to the Minidoka camp in Idaho while Jimmy was sent to Tule Lake in northern California.
After the US government imposed a loyalty test on the 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in camps in 1943, Tule Lake became a segregation center where those deemed “disloyal” were congregated. Thousands there renounced their US citizenship in protest. Jimmy Mirikitani was one of these renunciants. After the war ended, Jimmy and hundreds of others continued to be held without charge, first in Tule Lake, then in a Department of Justice INS camp in Crystal City, Texas. A single ACLU lawyer, Wayne Collins, worked for decades to help Jimmy and over 5,000 other renunciants reclaim the citizenship they had given up under duress.
In 1946, Jimmy was transferred to Seabrook Farms, a frozen food manufacturing plant near Bridgeton New Jersey. Here he and other renunciants on “relaxed internment” worked the 12-hour night shift, 6 days a week, sorting vegetables on an assembly line. By August 1947, Collins won their release, but fully restoring their citizenship took another decade.
Jimmy finally arrived in New York City in the early 1950s to attempt to resume his art career. When an art professor found him sleeping in the library at Columbia University, Jimmy was referred to the New York Buddhist Church where he was provided with room, board, and training as a cook. For years he traveled the East Coast to do seasonal work in resorts, summer camps, and country clubs. While cooking at a restaurant on Long Island, he met Jackson Pollock.
Jimmy’s US citizenship was finally restored in 1959, but by then he had moved so often that the government’s letter informing him of this never reached him. Eventually Jimmy became a live-in cook on Park Avenue, but when his employer died, Jimmy was suddenly without a home or a job. Soon he was sleeping on a park bench in Greenwich Village, selling his artwork to survive. He met Linda Hattendorf in Soho in 2001. She helped him apply for Social Security and housing benefits, and in 2002 he moved into an assisted-living retirement center run by Village Care of New York. Later that year, he was reunited with his sister Kazuko for the first time in 60 years. Both Jimmy and his sister passed away in 2012.
