Connected to the Washington state-wide celebration of America’s 250 anniversary, Densho is collaborating on a mini-exhibit for the “Out of Many, One” initiative with the Seattle Public Library.
The exhibit features the poster from the first Japanese American Pilgrimage from Seattle to the Puyallup Fairgrounds where many of the participants and their families were incarcerated during World War II and marked the first Day of Remembrance.
A movement rooted in memory, join Frank Abe as he shares the important moment it created and stories from the experience. This talk will be paired with an art-making activity for families to honor these histories created within Seattle and we will highlight the installed Densho (Out of Many, One Display) poster at the library. Refreshments will be served.
About the presenter:
Frank Abe is an author and activist who recently edited a new Penguin Classics anthology with Floyd Cheung of “The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration”, now in its third printing. He is lead author of a graphic novel on Japanese American resistance to wartime incarceration, “We Hereby Refuse“, a Finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Washington State Book Awards and now in its fifth printing, in collaboration with Tamiko Nimura, Ross Ishikawa, and Matt Sasaki. He won an American Book Award for “John Okada: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy“, co-edited with Greg Robinson and Floyd Cheung, and with Shannon Gee made the award-winning PBS documentary, “Conscience and the Constitution“, on the largest organized camp resistance. He’s now developing a new stage adaptation of “No-No Boy“.
With writer Frank Chin, Abe helped produce the first-ever “Day of Remembrance in 1978, and together they invented a new Japanese American tradition by producing car caravans and media events in Seattle and Portland that publicly dramatized the campaign for redress. “Days of Remembrance” are now observed as an annual event wherever Japanese Americans live.
