Ansel Adams’s photo of people leaving the Buddhist church during the second winter at Manzanar Relocation Center.

Manzanar Relocation Center, 1943

Five years ago, George M. Fukui ’45 (CLAS), ’48 M.S. wrote in UCONN magazine about his experiences as one of the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II and the fact that UConn was one of the few universities to offer the opportunity for Japanese Americans to leave the camps to continue their education.

Fukui went on to have a distinguished career as a research scientist.

In 2007, UConn continued to strengthen its connection to this moment in history when The William Benton Museum of Art, part of the School of Fine Arts, helped to organize the exhibition The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942–1946, based on the book by Delphine Hirasuna, with the Oregon Historical Society in collaboration with the National Japanese American Historical Society.

The touring exhibit arrived in Storrs for a 2008 semester viewing and a series of special education programs, which concluded in March.

The exhibition features nearly 200 objects made primarily from scrap and found materials by those detained in the camps and gives a sense of the full range of artistic activities that existed within the internment camps.

The exhibition also demonstrates the resiliency of the creative spirit — how human beings are able to create objects of beauty and meaning with humble materials and under the most difficult circumstances.

Included in the exhibition are photographs of life in the internment camps taken by Ansel Adams, America’s best-known photographer, who in 1943 documented life in the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. Adams donated his work to the Library of Congress, saying, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.”