Informed by his family history, Dean Terasaki uses activist imagery and charged ephemera—including postcards from Japanese American internment camps—to send a present-day “warning.”
Dean Terasaki’s studio is in his Phoenix home, which has a history tied to the city’s post-World War II growth accelerated by affordable tract housing. It’s situated in one of the city’s “Haverhoods,” on a street where the homes were designed by prominent mid-twentieth century architect Ralph Haver—but its characteristic cement blocks are painted turquoise, giving them a more modern feel.
Outside the abode he shares with his wife and fellow artist Teri Terasaki (who exhibits under the name Teri Tera), three small rocket birdhouses painted in primary colors capture the couple’s common interest in space. Inside, their artworks share walls with family photos and a landscape mural that came with the house.
Terasaki is passionate about creating photomontages on paper, using a mix of archival materials and photographs to illuminate hidden histories and their echoes in contemporary life. During a creative practice spanning decades, he’s focused on “the relationships between photography, memory, and the ways race, culture, and society manifest themselves in the landscape.” Today, he’s a member of the Eye Lounge artist collective, which helped to seed the city’s Roosevelt Row arts district.
I paid a visit to Terasaki’s studio in early May, just days after he finished packing up works for the Echoes of Injustice exhibition that opened on May 9 and continues through June 21, 2025, at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, the city where Terasaki was born and raised before heading west to earn his MFA at Arizona State University in Tempe.
The exhibition features works from Terasaki’s Veiled Inscriptions series, which combines imagery from the sites of internment camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II with postcards sent by prisoners requesting medication, hair dye, and other supplies.
The postcards came from a building in Denver, where they were discovered by new owners behind a wall amid 2012 renovations. During the war, the building housed the T.K. Pharmacy owned and operated by two of Terasaki’s uncles. “There’s a lot of mystery surrounding the letters,” the artist explains. “We don’t know how or why they ended up in the wall.”
But that’s not the artist’s only personal connection to his source material.
All of Terasaki’s grandparents immigrated from Japan, making him a sansei or third-generation Japanese American. Although members of his family weren’t incarcerated, Terasaki recalls the stories earlier generations would tell about the camps, which were created under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942.
A small jacket from a uniform his father Sam Saburo Terasaki wore while serving in a highly decorated US Army regiment composed entirely of Japanese American soldiers hangs in a hallway near his studio door. The triangle-folded flag from his father’s memorial service sits atop a tall bookshelf in the studio, near a desk where sunlight streams in from the backyard as the artist works at his computer.
Dad said they were cannon fodder—they had to prove that they were Americans and that they shouldn’t be in camps.
“My father never talked about his experiences during the war,” says Terasaki, who remembers one exception—the day they watched a documentary about his father’s unit during a family reunion. “My father got up and walked out to the porch, sobbing,” he recalls. “Dad said they were cannon fodder—they had to prove that they were Americans and that they shouldn’t be in camps.”
As we spoke, Terasaki recounted some of the early experiences that shaped his artistic practice—including his fascination with the precision design of a camera his father took from a German soldier, his discovery of a box of his father’s wartime photographs and medals, and his memories of the image-heavy LIFE magazines his parents kept around the house. “I trained my eye looking through those magazines,” he says.
Nowadays, he’s making new work for a fall 2025 solo show at the Chandler Museum, a municipal art space east of Phoenix that’s already presenting an exhibition examining Japanese American internment in Arizona. Meanwhile, one of his photomontages printed on a kimono-like form is part of the group show Many Lives: One Community at the Arizona Capitol Museum.
Still, it would be a mistake to assume that Terasaki’s creative practice addresses just one theme.
The artist has also created a significant body of work involving street protests, reflecting his own direct experience with protesting the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 legislation passed in 2010, and policies of the current Trump administration.
For one series, Terasaki photographed damaged trees in the landscape as he considered “nature’s power and the impermanence of life.”
For another, Terasaki attended fandom conventions in Phoenix, photographing cosplayers as a way to explore both geek culture and the concept of heroes. “My heroes are different than theirs, but we all have heroes that serve as beacons to help guide us through the sea of words and images in our lives,” he says.
Lately he’s been considering new ways of making art that would bring his concerns about the fragility of democracy to the public sphere beyond gallery and museum spaces. “Maybe it’s time to start thinking about doing guerrilla art,” he says.
Whatever form it takes, it’s clear that Terasaki’s work will continue to be informed by personal, family, and cultural histories, as well as his concerns about the present moment in American life.
“The story I’m telling about the incarceration of Japanese Americans,” he says, “is a warning that this can happen again.”
