NMDCA News:
The New Mexico Museum of Art presents Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration opening Sept. 5, a major exhibition bringing together ten Japanese and Japanese American artists examining the enduring impact of wartime incarceration, migration, memory, and place.
Featuring works by Ruth Asawa, Aisuke Kondo, David Horvitz, Lehuauakea, Patrick Nagatani, Ken Okiishi, Roger Shimomura, TT Takemoto, Gaku Tsutaja, and Carrie Yamaoka, Reclaiming the Future traces the reverberations of histories that remain embedded in the landscapes and communities of New Mexico. Through sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video, and mixed media, the exhibition considers how artists recover obscured narratives while proposing new ways of inhabiting the present and hopeful futures.
Nearly eighty-five years ago, during the Second World War, four Japanese American incarceration camps were established in New Mexico. Today, the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary stands just over one mile from the site of the Santa Fe Internment Camp, where, between 1942 and 1946, 4,555 Japanese and Japanese American men were incarcerated under the Alien Enemy Act. Across the United States, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent—most of them American citizens—were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated following Executive Order 9066, a profound rupture in the nation’s democratic ideals whose consequences continue to unfold.
Rather than treating incarceration as a closed chapter in history, Reclaiming the Future approaches it as an ongoing condition that echoes across generations. The artists excavate histories of forced displacement, racialized exclusion, labor, and cultural survival through practices rooted in archival research, material experimentation, embodied memory, and speculative imagination. Together, their works reveal how personal and collective histories are continually rewritten through acts of remembering, making, and repair.
Anchored by the museum’s proximity to the former Santa Fe Internment Camp, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the relationship between history and place—not as something fixed in the past, but as a living terrain shaped by remembrance, erasure, resilience, and return. Reclaiming the Future proposes that reclaiming history is also a way of reimagining what remains possible, asking how the unfinished work of memory might reshape our understanding of the present and our responsibilities to the future.
Schedule of events:
- 12–2 p.m. — Donor and Press Preview: Vladem lobby reception with curator and artist walkthroughs, light hors d’oeuvres, and dedicated time for interviews and photography.
- 5:30–7:30 p.m. — Public Opening Reception: Public remarks MOA, Curator, Artists. Music––light hors d’oeuvres and curated mocktails
About The New Mexico Museum of Art
The New Mexico Museum of Art is a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs. Programs and exhibits are supported by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and its donors. The mission of the Museum of Art is to create authentic experiences that foster a deeper understanding and enjoyment of art throughout our state. With a collection of more than 20,000 pieces of work, the museum brings the art of the world to New Mexico and the art of New Mexico to the world.
