Content warning for depictions of human rights violations.
On Jan. 21, 2025, the University of Connecticut’s William Benton Museum of Art opened two new displays: one showcasing the Digital Media and Design faculty’s creations and another focusing on creations by Minnie Negoro, a professor of art with a specialization in ceramics who taught at different art schools before teaching at UConn until her retirement in 1989. QR codes were located around the exhibit for added insight into not only the art, but on Negoro, her family and others she influenced as well. This article will cover Negoro’s exhibition.
Negoro was an American artist with Japanese ancestry and a variety of interests who founded the ceramics program at UConn. This exhibit is twofold, aiming not only to celebrate an influential figure in pottery and ceramics, but to also educate on the brutal conditions of American incarceration camps that those who were Japanese were subjected to.
Negoro was wrapping up her senior year of her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles when, due to rising racial tensions during World War II with the Japanese, the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, made the War Relocation Authority (WRA) incarcerate those of Japanese descendance living on the West Coast, around 126,000 total. They were to be held in government-mandated incarceration and concentration camps.
Negoro’s family were among the incarcerated. “Negoro had never been to Japan and was a U.S. citizen,” according to Dr. Hana Maruyama and Dr. Jason Chang, both professors of history & social and critical inquiry. They wrote the descriptions for the exhibit to help contextualize Negoro’s art and the historical and political ramifications that it has.
A plaque shared the important detail that those who were incarcerated were given only a week or less to situate themselves, take care of personal belongings and be shipped off to an American concentration camp. “We each could take only one suitcase plus eating utensils,” Negoro remarked. Furthermore, families were oftentimes split apart and it was uncertain when they could be reunited. For example, Negoro’s brother, Kaiji, was sent to a different camp.
There was a plaque dedicated to the usage of certain terms when discussing the era of Japanese incarceration in the United States. It warns against using the term “internment” to describe the incarceration because of how it reinforces racist connotations. In particular “The Roosevelt administration avoided it in 1942 because it refers to procedures for the imprisonment of enemy aliens [sic.] under the Geneva Convention.”
Overly palatable terms such as “relocation” and “evacuation” sanitized the cruelty that Japanese Americans faced. The Japanese American National Museum, according to Maruyama and Chang, recommends using the term “American concentration camps” to distance it from Nazi death camps or “incarceration” to describe what had happened to Japanese Americans during World War II. Language plays an integral role in how human beings view the world and words can oftentimes have certain subtexts or connotations that can negatively affect people. This clarification on the plaque highlights this and does a great job of educating the museum’s audience.
There was a plaque with photographs detailing the brutality that the WRA put Negoro, her family and other Japanese Americans through at the Pomona Assembly Center. “About a third of the incarcerees lived in animal stalls,” according to Maruyama and Chang. Furthermore, due to poor planning, there were food shortages and consistent food poisoning.
Negoro was eventually sent to the Heart Mountain Ceramics Plant, where they aimed to employ her and about 99 other incarcerates to make 6,000 pieces of tableware each week for the purposes of the centers and the military. The WRA hired Daniel Rhodes, a potter who recently graduated with his Master’s in ceramics, to teach Negoro and five to seven others how to make pottery. The conditions in which they worked showed how little the WRA cared, as “The center’s first potter’s wheel was made from scrap lumber and an auto shaft that had been tossed in the junk pile.” Despite this, Negoro formed a bond with Rhodes, her mentor, and they practiced pottery together in their expressions.
Eventually, the WRA cancelled the plans for the ceramics plant. The space was repurposed to have art classes, Negoro being one of the instructors.
In her dedication to ceramics and pottery, Negoro persevered through the racist incarceration that stole her time and freedom and made a career out of what she learned during that time. She is truly an inspiration who has influenced a generation of potters — as shown by the display — and deserves more attention for her art. She wasn’t just a potter, but a seamstress and a general creative type who made things by hand.
Negoro’s exhibit will be up at the Benton Museum of Art until July 27, 2025.