Legacies of the Land: Photographs by Joan Myers and Patrick Nagatani

“Legacies of the Land: Photographs by Joan Myers and Patrick Nagatani” explores what remains of sites of Japanese incarceration in the United States, four of which are in New Mexico. Fears about national security peaked after the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to remove approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent from their homes on the West Coast to “relocation centers” further inland.

In the 1980s and 1990s, two American photographers, Joan Myers (b. 1944) and Patrick Nagatani (1945-2017), traveled independently to find what were relatively unmarked sites of World War II detention camps, photographing the remains. Myers’ images capture the scarce traces of the incarcerees’ residence on the land and the poignancy of the everyday objects they left behind. Nagatani, whose parents and grandparents were among the incarcerated during the war, traveled to the ten primary relocation sites, which he refers to as concentration camps.

Accompanying these photographs from the museum’s collection is a painting by New Mexican artist Jerry West (b. 1933), whose father and uncle worked at an incarceration facility in Santa Fe, one of four confinement sites in New Mexico (now designated by a marker on a hill at the Frank S. Ortiz Park).

Curated by Katherine Ware, former Curator of Photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art, this exhibition coincides with "Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration, on view at the museum’s Vladem Contemporary from September 5, 2026, through May 31, 2027."

Image:
Patrick Nagatani, “Manzanar, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, California, August 13, 1994 / MA-17-20-67,” August 13, 1994, chromogenic print, 10 1/4 × 12 3/4 in., collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of Patrick Nagatani, 2017 (2017.12.98), © Patrick Nagatani Estate, photo by Kevin Beltran.