Massive pillars of crumpled, yellowed, ink-faded paper ID tags suspend from the ceiling in Wendy Maruyama’s room-filling installation at the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. There are 120,000 handwritten tags, all bearing the names of Japanese-Americans evicted from their homes, rounded up and imprisoned in internment camps during World War II for the crime of being of Japanese descent.Maruyama, a furnituremaker and third-generation Japanese-American, started the “Tag Project” in 2008 out of “ignorance” of her ancestors’ history, at first intending to re-create the tags of 1,100 residents of Chula Vista, Calif., her hometown. That number swelled to 120,000, spanning 10 columns of tags, here displayed as part of Maruyama’s “Executive Order 9066,” opening Friday, Oct. 9, at the Morikami.Use the above source link for see the entire story!
