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Topaz: Artists in Internment their visual work and words

01/22/2012 - 15:14

The Topaz Art show grand opening on Jan. 20, 2012 featured 32 pieces of art painted at Topaz with a poetry reading by Lawson Inada.

The show will remain at the Rio Gallery in Salt Lake City until Feb. 13 when it will travel to San Leandro and later to the San Francisco Public Library.

App for Topaz site tour

01/03/2012 - 17:15

 iPhone App Recreates WWII-Era Japanese American Internment Camp

 New RAMA walking tour, “Topaz Relocation Camp,” uses geo-located historical photographs and narrative to reconstruct infamous concentration camp in Utah desert

 DELTA, Utah—Dec 16, 2011—Today, the 19,800 acres where 11,000  Japanese American internees farmed and lived in isolation from the rest of the country is easy to miss on the drive west from Delta, Utah. A new iPhone walking tour, however, aims to virtually reconstruct the historical Topaz War Relocation Center, so that this flat stretch of desert—and the dark time in American civil rights history it represents—won’t be so easily overlooked.

 Available on Rama, the BBC-recommended iPhone app that serves as a portal for authors offering photographic walking tours, “Topaz Relocation Camp” uses the iPhone’s mapping and GPS functions to guide visitors through the former site of the camp and offer glimpses of its former structures and residents. Using archival and personal photographs taken at the camp in the 1940s, the tour’s journey-through-time  shows and tells the story  of the internees at Topaz, including  daily life in the camp’s 36 residential blocks,  toiling on the farms in the desert, the activities of the local Boy Scouts troop, and the Topaz High School’s dances.

 “I wanted to tell a story of triumph over...

Topaz: Artists in Internment their visual work and words

01/03/2012 - 16:32

 Topaz: Artists in Internment exhibit at the Rio Gallery

Friday, Jan. 13 – Feb. 10, 2012

 SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Arts & Museums will open the traveling exhibit Topaz: Artists in Internment Their Visual Work and Words Jan. 13 at the Rio Gallery. A public reception will be held Friday, Jan. 20, from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. during the Salt Lake Gallery Stroll. There will be a screening of the short documentary Days of Waiting, poetry reading by former Oregon poet laureate Lawson Inada, and an opportunity to honor descendants and survivors of the internment experience. The exhibit will continue until Feb. 10 during state office hours, which are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. The Rio Gallery is located at 300 S. Rio Grande Street (455 West) in Salt Lake City.

 Topaz: Artists in Internment will feature artworks created during internment at the Topaz War Relocation Center near Delta, Utah, on loan from the Topaz Museum. Artwork by Chiura Obata, Setsu Nagata Kanehara, Charles Erabu Mikami, Miné Okubo, Thomas Ryosaku Matsuoka, Yajiro Okamoto, Kenji Utsumi and Kaneo Kido will be shown alongside the poetry of Lawson Inada. Inada was interned with his parents in camps in Fresno, Arkansas and Colorado, and was Oregon’s poet laureate from 2006 to 2010.

 “We are pleased to launch the traveling exhibit Topaz: Artists in Internment...

CyArk

10/24/2011 - 12:07

CyArk News Release

For Immediate Release - September 12, 2011

The National Park Service (NPS) has partnered with CyArk through the Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program to digitally preserve the Topaz Relocation Center. CyArk, is a California based non-profit dedicated to creating a digital archive of the world’s heritage sites for preservation and education. The Topaz Relocation Center is one of three camps to be documented under this grant program through critical partnerships with the University of Colorado Denver’s Center of Preservation Research and Denshō. Future documentation work is set for the Manzanar and Tule Lake sites in California.

Through close collaboration with NPS and the Topaz Museum Board of Directors, CyArk will be able to create a 3D digital reconstruction model of what the camp looked like in its days of use. From the CyArk website (http://archive.cyark.org) the public will have access to the 3D model as well as other interfaces that will allow them to zoom in on a specific barrack and learn about the individuals who occupied it through historic photographs and recorded audio interviews of surviving internees. This content will be shared and linked to from the Topaz Museum website as well (http://www.topazmuseum.org/). CyArk Program Manager,...