American Infamy, Roger Shimomura

Dominated by a sense of desolation and entrapment, this painting uses the broad perspective of a screen painting to depict life in Minidoka, the internment camp in Idaho where Shimomura’s family was forced to relocate during WWII. In the foreground, the shadowy figure of a soldier stands before a conspicuous
assault weapon, watching the camp through binoculars. The viewer’s placement behind this figure suggests a similarly voyeuristic vantage to that of the guard. Billowing clouds break the composition of barrack homes and barbed wire, but through the gaps in the far distance, one sees the empty landscape that engulfs Minidoka’s residents. Shimomura populates the scene with individualized figures performing daily activities as though everything were normal, such as the child skipping rope near the center of the painting. However, amid these vignettes of normalcy are the constant reminders of surveillance by the armed guard looming over civilians in the foreground and figures at the camp’s border who stare through the barbed wire into their barren surroundings.