Disturbing event cancellation at Pike Place Market in Seattle | versus public art in PortlandA
According to the Seattle Times, "Pike Place Market backs out of event on incarceration of Japanese Americans." The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII mostly affected people on the West Coast. Plenty of people at the time were favorable to the deportation. From the article:
An event commemorating the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and calling attention to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies was canceled by Pike Place Market less than two weeks before the scheduled event.
The Pike Place Market Foundation determined the event’s “resistance” messaging did not align with its purpose as a social service organization, philanthropy director Patricia Gray said in a statement Monday.
For me, as a past board member of a public market in DC this is disturbing, because a public market is a public space and a legitimate place to hold protests and have discourse on public issues of all types.
Which is why I've always been amazed by the Tri-Met transit agency in Portland, which hasn't avoided controversy in its public art program. I was there for a historic preservation conference in 2005, and one of the tours I registered for was of the light rail. There were a bunch of issues related to getting it approved, funded, and built, and ancillary issues like public art.
At the Exposition Station, when the Expo Center was used as a staging center for Japanese internment and the public art on the transit station site reflected that, presenting a with "dog tags" like those issued to the internees ("Speak Now – Vocabulary of Memory," Ultra Portland).
Valerie Otani addresses the theme of Japanese relocation during World War II at the site of the 1942 Portland Assembly Center. Traditional Japanese timber gates strung with metal "internee ID tags" mark station entrances. Vintage news articles are etched in steel and wrapped around the gate legs. (The artist spoke to us on our tour. And the headlines of the newspapers included in the work were vicious and racist. )
The other amazing thing about the installation is that there were metal copies of Portland newspaper front pages from that time, and they were amazing racist and virulent wrt the Japanese-Americans.
It certainly puts the decision of Pike Place Market in perspective. From the article:
Tsuru for Solidarity, a social justice and immigrant rights organization led by Japanese Americans, planned to hold a “Day of Remembrance and Resistance” event at the market on Feb. 19. The foundation notified the group of the cancellation Feb. 7. The Day of Remembrance commemorates President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast.
Pike Place Market had seemed like a poignant location for the event, said Stanley Shikuma, a member of Tsuru for Solidarity’s leadership council.
Despite discriminatory practices in daily stall assignments, Japanese American vendors were the primary driver of the market’s success in the decades after it opened in 1907. Before World War II, Japanese American farmers occupied more than 75% of the produce stalls at the market.
Later the Market apologized for the cancellation but it's not clear if the event will still go forward-TV) ("Pike Place Market apologizes for withdrawing from nonprofit's Day of Remembrance event," KING5). They said the event isn't congruent with their values.
I can understand self-censorship. I think public spaces like markets, excepting Nazi demonstrations, need to be hands off in terms of content. Either approve almost everything, or don't approve anything. Although I don't see how the Trump Administration would attack the Market. Especially in a highly Democratic city like Seattle.
In any case, Portland's Tri-Met is a definite outlier. Cf when DC cancelled an art installation proposed for the Anacostia River, installing a gas station pump canopy in the River, challenging fossil fuels and their effect on the environment, and for a time aimed to squelch dissent in art ("Public art, environment, history, and the locals all collide in the Anacostia River" Grist, ""After outcry, D.C. commission backs down on censoring art," Washington Post).
Antediluvian by Mia Feuer
Art and dissent has a long tradition, longer than that of the collision of public art, dissent and public funding. Art in places of contestation is equally problematic ("Monuments as public art, historiography, and change," 2020).
Labels: freedom of assembly/First Amendment, protest and advocacy, public art, public space management
posted by Richard Layman @ 4:00 AM&Permanent Link
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The director resigned effective 3/7.
https://www.ocregister.com/2025/02/27/descanso-gardens-looks-at-history-of-a-local-interment-camp-with-new-exhibition
Descanso Gardens looks at history of a local internment camp with new exhibition
New exhibition tells the story of local people imprisoned during World War II.
Descanso Gardens is exploring a difficult but important moment in U.S. history as it looks at wartime xenophobia and honors the stories of more than 2,000 Japanese, German and Italian detainees with a new weekend exhibition.
The Gardens partnered with the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition to open an exhibit dubbed “Only the Oaks Remain.” It runs March 7-9 and features photos and personal accounts of people who were interned at the Tuna Canyon Detention Station in Los Angeles during World War II.
Although the barbed wire fences, guard posts and barracks are gone, the Detention Station, which is located about five miles from the gardens, was a key component of this tragic period that started with Executive Order 9066. The order authorized the removal and confinement of people labeled as enemy aliens.
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