Miné Okubo
Miné Okubo
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Miné Okubo

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Miné Okubo

Miné Okubo (/ˈmn/;Japanese: 大久保 ミネ, June 27, 1912 – February 10, 2001) was an American artist and writer. She is best known for her book Citizen 13660, a collection of 198 drawings and accompanying text chronicling her experiences in Japanese American internment camps during World War II.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Okubo and her brother Benji were interned to the Tanforan Assembly Center and then the Topaz War Relocation Center from 1942 to 1944. There she made over 2,000 drawings and sketches of daily life in the camps, many of which were included in her book. After her release Okubo relocated to New York to continue her career as an artist, earning numerous awards and recognitions.

Born in Riverside, California, Miné Okubo attended Poly High School, Riverside Junior College, and later received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley, class of 1938. A recipient of the Bertha Taussig Memorial Traveling Fellowship in 1938, Okubo spent two years traveling in France and Italy where she continued her development as an artist. While in Paris, she studied under the famous early 20th-century avant-garde painter Fernand Léger.

From 1939 to 1942, following her return to America from Europe, Okubo created several murals under commission by the Federal Art Project. She was also commissioned by the United States Army to create mosaics and fresco murals. She collaborated with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in San Francisco for the Works Progress Administration. Prior to the order for internment, while living in Berkeley, CA, Okubo had been creating mosaics for Fort Ord and the Servicemen's Hospitality House in Oakland, CA. Okubo obtained a special permit, an exemption to the 5-mile travel limit from home, necessary to perform her work in Oakland.

On April 24, 1942, within five months of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and two months after Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, Okubo along with her brother, Toku Okubo, who had been a student at Berkeley, were forcibly relocated to the Japanese American assembly center at Tanforan. Living in a converted horse stall furnished with army cots, they were forced to adjust to the twice-daily roll calls, curfews, and the lack of privacy.

Following six months of confinement at Tanforan, Okubo and her brother were transferred to the Topaz Relocation Center, Utah. Almost never without her sketchpad, Okubo recorded her images of drama, humiliation, and everyday struggle. While interned, Okubo taught art to children and later entered a magazine contest with her drawing of a camp guard. Okubo helped found the literary magazine Trek while at Topaz.

When Fortune magazine learned of her talent, the firm hired her as an illustrator, an arrangement that allowed her to leave the camp after a two-year confinement and relocate to New York. Prior to leaving Topaz for New York City, Okubo shipped a crate of her belongings to Fortune magazine's offices.

After arriving in New York, Okubo published a book about her and her brother's experience as prisoners in the internment camps in California and Utah. The graphic novel, called Citizen 13660, documents the struggles and achievements of the Japanese American and Japanese people imprisoned at the camps. The title comes from the number assigned to her family unit; the book contains almost two hundred of her pen and ink sketches accompanied by explanatory text.

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