January 22 – March 30, 2008

Tagged required three years to complete and is a meditation on the nature of ethnic prejudice. Images are photo transferred onto solid-sculpted glass “tongues.” The majority of the photographs are altered reproductions of photos by Dorothea Lange, taken for the War Relocation Authority during the period that Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to internment camps. The “book” shows a family photograph from the Topaz Internment Camp, with the artist’s mother shown as a young girl seated at the right. The newspaper clippings, primarily from The New York Times, are about recent ethnic prejudice directed against Arab-Americans. All the clippings are from September 11, 2001 to 2004, when the work was completed.Tagged is being presented as part of the on-going Dialogues program in conjunction with The Art of Gaman.

January 22 – March 30, 2008

Location recordings were made at these two Japanese American internment camps in California. Using self-built transducers, sounds were recorded from artifacts still at the camps: barbed wire, crumbling foundations of the former barracks, plants, and from the boughs of an apple tree that had been planted by the internees. One also hears windharps, site-specific pieces the artist constructed at the sites.

“For me,” wrote Richard Lerman, “the recording made at sites from the existing objects and plants are about the past—these objects were present at that time and were therefore witness to everything that occurred at the camps. The windharps and constructs are more about the present time and explore how we now regard these places.”

Manzanar and Tule Lake is the second section of a longer work, From Dark to Light…but Dark. In this piece, the other recording locations include Auschwitz, Trinity Site (New Mexico), and Hiroshima.

Richard Lerman works in audio art, installations, and media. For years he has designed and built his own transducers usually using piezo disks. These are able to record sounds too soft for our hearing and allow him to record sounds of the environment that also allow the sonic flavor of each material to emerge. We know these as the devices inside cell phones beckoning us to answer.

January 22 – March 30, 2008

In 1943, distinguished American photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984) captured through his lens the individuals, daily life, work, and pastimes in the Manzanar War Relocation Center, located at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, approximately two hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. Of his photos, Adams wrote when he offered the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…. All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document.” While criticized by some for their beauty and seeming cheerfulness, the photographs chronicle the lives and activities of the camp that eventually held more than 10,000 prisoners.

This documentary installation of contemporary prints is drawn from the extensive digital holdings of the Library of Congress; it is exhibited in conjunction with The Art of Gaman, further contextualizing the experience of the Japanese American internees. The photographs in this exhibition are contemporary prints from “Suffering Under a Great Injustice: Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar,” in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.