Art as Agency: Creating Beauty at Amache and Beyond

9 am: Check-in and late registration
Coffee and breakfast snacks served in Sharp Auditorium lobby (Hamilton Building, Lower Level)

10 am: Welcome
Welcome remarks by JR Henneman, Director and Curator, Petrie Institute of Western American Art

10:15–11 am: ShiPu Wang, Ph.D.
The Landscape of Resilience and Resistance: Paintings by Japanese American Artists During World War II

11-11:45 am: Clement Hanami
Contested Histories: Preserving and Sharing a Community Collection

11:45 am-12 pm: Comments
Patricia Limerick, Professor of History of the American West, University of Colorado Boulder

12-1:30 pm: Lunch in Sturm Grand Pavilion
Lunch includes a sandwich, chips, dessert, and water

1:30-1:40 pm: After-lunch remarks
JR Henneman

1:40-2:25 pm: Melissa Geisler Trafton, Ph.D.
Printmaking and Collaborating in Block 6E: The Silk Screen Shop at Amache

2:30-3:15 pm: Bonnie J. Clark, Ph.D. & Jonathan Thumas, Ph.D.
Garden or Shrine? Art and Spirituality in Japanese American Incarceration Camp Landscapes

3:15-3:30 pm: Summation of afternoon ideas
Patricia Limerick

3:30-3:45 pm: Break

3:45-4:30 pm: Panel discussion with select Q&A

4:30-5:30 pm: Happy Hour
Refreshments and light snacks served in Sharp Auditorium immediately following symposium

ShiPu Wang is the Coats Family Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at the University of California, Merced. His scholarship has centered around rediscovering and reevaluating the work and legacy of diasporic Asian American artists in the first half of the twentieth century, with a special focus on Nikkei artists and their productivity and collectivity during the Exclusion Era. Author and editor of four books and numerous journal articles, Wang’s The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (2017) won the 2018 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Book Prize. He has also curated two touring exhibitions: Chiura Obata: An American Modern (2018–2020), and Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from November 14, 2024, through August 17, 2025. In addition to teaching and curating, Wang has served on the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Board of Commissioners, the editorial board of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s academic journal, American Art, as a SAAM/Terra Foundation Senior Fellow, and a Terra Foundation Senior Fellow at the Brooklyn Museum. He is the 2024-25 Hannah and Russell Kully Distinguished Fellow in American Art at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

Clement Hanami is a Japanese-American visual artist who grew up in East Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in Studio Art with a specialization in New Genres. His work has been exhibited in California, New York, and Mexico, and has been seen at the Geffen Contemporary, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Armory Center for the Arts, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, California Museum of Photography, Long Beach Museum of Art, AFI National Video Festival, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Mr. Hanami is currently the Vice President of Exhibitions and Art Director at the Japanese American National Museum and his most recent projects include curating the exhibitions Instructions to All Persons: Reflections on Executive Order 9066 and Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo. He taught New Genres at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts for 20 years. He was a Cultural Affairs Commissioner for the City of Culver City from 2004 to 2010. He received a Getty Visual Arts Fellowship in 2000 and a COLA Artist Award in 2007 given by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles.

Dr. Bonnie Clark is committed to using tangible history – objects, sites, and landscapes—to broaden understanding of our diverse past. She began her career as a professional archaeologist and now serves as a Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Denver (DU), as well as the Curator for Archaeology of the DU Museum of Anthropology. She is the author or editor of numerous publications including Finding Solace in the Soil: An Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at Amache and On the Edge of Purgatory: An Archaeology of Place in Hispanic Colorado. Dr. Clark leads the DU Amache Project, a community collaboration committed to researching, preserving, and interpreting the physical history of Amache, Colorado’s WWII-era Japanese American internment camp. That work has been highlighted in numerous venues including Archaeology and American Archaeology magazines. In 2011, Dr. Clark’s work was recognized by her peers with the University of Denver’s Teacher/Scholar of the Year award.

Jonathan Thumas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, with a secondary field in Archaeology, from Harvard University. A scholar of Japanese religions, his research combines archaeological and archival materials to understand the relationship between Buddhism and local society in medieval Japan. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Places Apart: Buddhist Reclusion in Medieval Japan,” which evaluates the impact of reclusive Buddhist monks and their hermitages on medieval Japanese religious history. In demonstrating how reclusion involved a negotiation of Buddhism with medieval social life, this book reimagines how Buddhism became a religion for the medieval Japanese populace. This project is based on archival research conducted at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo through the support of the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai Fellowship for Foreign Scholars. This research also draws from ongoing community-collaborative archaeological survey in Kyoto. In addition to his work in Japan, Dr. Thumas is also a collaborator on the DU Amache Project, in which he participates in excavation, survey, and interpretation of Japanese language materials. He is presently pursuing research on the religious communities that developed at Amache.

Melissa Geisler Trafton is an art historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century American art and visual culture. Currently she is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her book Collective Agency and Resistance during Japanese American Incarceration - The Amache Silk Screen Shop will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in early 2025. She also has created a website for the Amache Alliance that reproduces all known screen prints from Amache. Her scholarly interests focus on the intersection between image and text, and the reception and circulation of printed images. Other publications have appeared in American Art, Panorama, the published papers of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife at Historic Deerfield, and various museum exhibition catalogs.

Patricia Limerick is a Professor of History of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 1986 to 2022, she was the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado. In addition, she was named to serve as the Colorado State Historian from 2016 to 2018, and appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory board called The National Council on the Humanities. Limerick was nominated by President Obama in Spring 2015 and was confirmed by the United States Senate in November of 2015, and served until October 2019. She is the author of Desert Passages, The Legacy of Conquest, Something in the Soil, and A Ditch in Time. A frequent public speaker and a columnist for The Denver Post, Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public, to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts, and to making the case for humor as an essential asset of the humanities. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Hazel Barnes Prize (the University of Colorado’s highest award for teaching and research), she has served as president of the American Studies Association, the Western History Association, the Society of American Historians, and the Organization of American Historians, as well as the vice president for teaching of the American Historical Association. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her Ph.D. from Yale University.