Obata and his family were forcibly removed from their home of three decades in the San Francisco Bay Area to the Topaz Relocation Center in Delta, Utah, along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans from the West Coast who were put in internment camps during World War II.

This image he created in 1942 of new arrivals at the camp reminded me of pictures of Jews arriving at Nazi concentration camps during the same war.

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There was a huge exhibit at the American Art Museum of the work of Chiura Obata (1885-1975), who immigrated to the US in 1903 and went on to become one of the most significant Japanese-American cultural leaders of the last century.

‘Mountain Stream in Autumn, Happy Isles,’ Chiura Obata 1937), posted earlier