Opening: Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration

The New Mexico Museum of Art invites the public to teh opening reception for Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration, a major exhibition bringing together ten Japanese and Japanese American artists whose work engages the enduring legacies 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. Across 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.

Rather than treating incarceration as a singular historical event, 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.