Wednesday, December 2, 6 – 7pm
Free; registration required.
About the Talk
Join us for a discussion with artist and filmmaker Rea Tajiri and author and poet Brandon Shimoda, whose commissioned poem “To be hybrid anticipates the future / or, in a strange land among strangers” appears in the Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America exhibition catalogue as a response to Isamu Noguchi’s 1942 essay “I Become a Nisei.”
Touching on writing, film, visual art, and personal history, Shimoda and Tajiri will reflect on how their practices engage with the histories, memories, and legacies of Japanese Americans who experienced incarceration during World War II. Together, they will consider how creative work can recover overlooked stories, honor lived experience, and open new ways of understanding the impact of incarceration on families and communities today.
The program is presented alongside Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America. Featuring works by Isamu Noguchi, George Nakashima, Leo Amino, S. Neil Fujita, Kay Sekimachi, and Ruth Asawa, this groundbreaking exhibition reconsiders 20th-century art and design within the context of Japanese and Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the broader history of America.
Speakers
Brandon Shimoda
Shimoda is an award-winning poet and a professor at Colorado College, where he teaches creative writing and Asian American literature and serves as curator of the Hiroshima Library, a collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His book The Afterlife Is Letting Go (City Lights, 2024), about the memory/forgetting of Japanese American incarceration, received the Colorado Book Award. Photo by Scott Tsuchitani
Rea Tajiri
Tajiri is a filmmaker and visual artist who was born in Chicago. She earned her BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Her award-winning film, digital video, and installation work has been supported by grants, fellowships, and artistic residencies and has been exhibited widely by museums, on television, and at film festivals.
Sponsor
Support is generously provided by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia City Fund’s 2026 Milestone Grant Fund, supported by PECO.
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