2016 Year of the Monkey

These past 365 days are going to linger in my memory, probably forever. It was a cycle of surprise, of risk, of big challenges and big honking love. My husband and I got into the grown-up game by purchasing a house in the city we first fell in love in— Oakland, despite off the charts, record housing prices and brutal competition for those homes that were available. We moved into the new house in late November, just about now, when the first autumn rains began, and the persimmons and pomegranates were hitting their peak.

We were ecstatic. The two of us! We bought a home, and immediately began nesting, cooking warm hearty meals together, planting a vegetable garden, luxuriating on Sundays in bed with the sun streaming through the upstairs windows.

One month later, I felt....odd. Not sick exactly but off.  Lo and behold, and at an age one easily believes as "out of range" for such possibilities, we discovered to our complete surprise, that we were pregnant. A baby!

Our precious Takumi was born on August 6, 2015 in Oakland and our lives have been utterly transformed, and so has my art and art practice. As many of you know, I try to produce a linoleum block/letterpress calendar every year, and though its always a push for me to get it out in time for holiday sales, this year I had completely written the possibility off of the table. Being a new mom of a three month old, I was still favoring sleep over creative time.

But then one sleepless night, I started researching Japanese snow monkeys (native to Northern Japan, the Japanese Macaque), thickly furred beasts who love to luxuriate in mountainside hot springs, and fell in love again with the social bonds that these magnificent mammals share.  I had to do a block print.

It took nearly two weeks to complete the drawing and do the carving, which was especially challenging given my very very limited schedule to work (I spent all night and day with Takumi during the weekdays, and get breaks in parenting with the support of my most excellent husband late nights and on the weekends), plus I've been suffering from debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome since the baby was born.

The key block was drawn and carved in Oakland, before we headed up to the Sierra Nevadas, and I finished the second color block, coincidentally, in the snowy climes of Reno.

Finally, in the first weeks of November, I was ready to jump onto the press, and over two Saturdays, I worked on getting the blocks printed (two-color) and the calendar pages printed on a Vandercook SP20 letterpress in Berkeley.

Pink monkeys for an especially tender beginning for 2016. I actually chose the color with the Japanese sweet potato (its skin is a very vibrant mauve) in mind, and likely a favorite food of the monkey.

The calendars are available at my Etsy store for $25.00 each plus shipping.  My humblest thanks to Mary Risala Laird for lending me her boxcar base, to Katherine Case, for the use of her calendar plates, Coriander Reisbord for use of the Sp20 letter press, and Samuel Arbizo for doing double daddy duty two Saturdays in a row so mama could run off into the studio. You guys are everything.

Mimi-nashi Hoichi, a "Small Plates" artist residency at the San Francisco Center for the Book

 

Conjure, if you will, the twang and deep throated rumble of a four-stringed biwa lute, accompanied by the tense voice of a blind storyteller who sits in the shadows. His song, the "Heike Monogatari," is ageless, having survived for thousands of years in the form of narrative poetry, although it has also found life in classic paintings, books, plays, films, and musical scores and is considered to be the greatest of the Japanese war stories. 

My newest letterpress/linoleum block book, "Mimi-nashi Hoichi," recounts the story of a sightless biwa player named Hoichi, whose ears are sheared off following a score of nights performing the "Heike Monogatari" song cycles in a cemetery off the shores of Shiminoseki, Yamaguchi-ken. 

Over the course of roughly four months, I was one of three artists that were invited to do a residency at the wonderful San Francisco Center for the Book, to complete the project. The challenge of the Small Plates residency is that the book must be 4" x 4" trim size, and utilize the resources and equipment of the Center as best as you can. It was an incredible experience, with the best access to book arts tools, equipment, and most importantly— knowledge in the form of staff, other fellow printers, and even the other two artists in residence, Michelle Wilson and Andy Rottner.

The first step required me to draw and hand carve the many linoleum block illustrations to accompany the text which was printed entirely on letterpresses.

The text was printed from polymer plates created by local printing powerhouse, Logos Graphics, which took a fair amount of wiggling around to make sure that everything registered correctly since the pages were printed six pages up per run. No room for errors!

The entire final book was printed using black Ganson rubberbased inks on Chandler and Price and Vandercook letterpresses.

And then there was the binding. I gathered up a group of my most awesome book arts friends in the SF Bay Area, plied them with food (thank you for cooking, Thy Tran!) and had many, many hands at the table to pierce, clamp, trim, collate, glue, fold, sew, and put the books to bed.

 Twenty pages printed on natural and jade handmade Loksa Nepalese papers with a Japanese stab binding. Wheeee!

First Public Artwork- I Am An American/Family No 25344/Wartime Civil Control Station

When the first Japanese immigrant laborers arrived in rural Fresno County in 1900, they cultivated the sandy loam and hardpan lands bordering the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers, helping to transform them into lush grape vineyards, fig and stone fruit orchards, and vast fields of cotton and wheat. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I am a fourth-generation descendant of immigrant farmers who settled in the Central Valley farming communities of Sanger and Fresno, and with a legacy of family members who had thriving businesses in the pre-war Japantown downtown. I grew up surrounded by the hard-scrabble ethics of working farmers and the pleasures of their bounty, found in the fog of peach blossoms misting the valley air, and the long rows of pruned and tied grapevines ticking past the window of our family car. Both sides of my family were unjustly incarcerated in American concentration camps out of the Fresno area during World War II.

Three original concept sketches.

In the summer of 2014, I was invited to submit a proposal for a public art work piece to be permanently installed not only in downtown Fresno, but on the site of the building where thousands of Fresno's Japanese Americans were instructed to line up, register their names for government numbers, and were ultimately bussed out to the first leg of their incarceration experience in the spring of 1942. I have no photographs of my family from the days that they packed all of their earthly belongings in a panic, or of the long lines my grandparents had to wait in to be fingerprinted and receive their identification tags, nor of the tearful farewells they bid their friends and colleagues. Both the registration and the departure occurred at the Droge Building, located on the corner of Inyo and Van Ness.

On May 12-13, 1942, all persons of Japanese descent living in the city of Fresno were instructed to meet at the Droge Building, where an official wartime civil control station was established, to exchange their personal identities for family numbers. The Droge Building was the civil control station for the city of Fresno, although it was not the only station in the area (as far as I can tell, there were at least eight stations for Fresno county.)



How has the Droge Building been a witness to Fresno's own complex history and identity? What happened between those walls? Who were the people who were hired to process these individuals into numbers and statistics, many who had been born in Fresno and had known no other home? What small gestures of humanity, if any, occurred in those devastating months and days when the civil control station at Inyo street became the point of departure into a future unknown?

My medium of choice was, of course, linoleum block— an artform with its own historical echoes in Japanese culture and is exceptionally well-suited for the type of fabrication that the program is proposing: laser or water-cut metal panels, which accentuate the strength of line and positive/negative spaces.

The final piece stands 3' x 5' and was installed and dedicated in February 2015. In honor of my late maternal grandmother and grandfather, Johnson and Miyeko Kebo, I have affixed their family number onto the artwork, so that her journey in particular through the Droge Building, itself now a ghost of the past, will be remembered.

(My father, Donald Mitsuru Wakida, who was also incarcerated, standing in front of the work. He didn't even know it was there until I made him drive over with me to look at it!)