In 1942, Miné Okubo and her family were given three days to pack their belongings and get ready for “pioneer life.” It was no vacation. A presidential order in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor forcibly removed the Okubos—and more than 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, mostly U.S. citizens—from their home to one of ten detention centers in the American West.
It was a shock to the thirty-year-old Californian, an accomplished artist and Berkeley graduate who painted murals for the federal Works Progress Administration and studied under Diego Rivera. The Okubos were sent to Topaz, a camp in an inhospitable, arid, and windy stretch of central Utah. Temperatures ranged from 100 degrees to below zero. There was no running water and little heat or nutritious food. Okubo busied herself with teaching art to camp mates and sketching everything from the humiliating to the quotidian. She produced more than 1,000 drawings that became the basis for her groundbreaking 1946 graphic memoir Citizen 13660.
While still interned, she completed Wind and Dust, this watercolor on paperboard that hauntingly depicts the camps’ hopelessness. A family huddles to fend off a swirl of dust. Dozens of lookalike barracks extend behind them in a bleak, brown landscape. The 1943 painting is on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through August 2025, in an exhibition that honors three American female artists of Japanese descent.
Okubo’s art ultimately helped free her. In 1944, staff at Fortune magazine—who had seen her drawings—successfully petitioned for her release to hire her. After her move to New York that year, Okubo lived in the same Greenwich Village apartment, creating art, until her death in 2001.
