Imagine a Museum Behind Barbed Wire

Manzanar Visual Education Museum staff, 1943.

Photo by Toyo Miyatake.

This article was written by Maya Castronovo, a Great Basin Research Associate at the Manzanar National Historic Site.

Under the watchful eyes of military police, visitors marvel at desert flora, minerals, insect specimens, and other local objects on display. A visual library with approximately four thousand pictures, models, slides, and diagrams adds to the attraction. Outside the museum, children play at a small zoo complete with local fauna, picnic tables, and a barbeque pit.

The year is 1943. The collection belongs to the Visual Education Museum at Manzanar, a concentration camp that imprisoned over 10,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

This summer, I found myself working at a different kind of museum. As a Curation Technician intern based in Death Valley National Park, I help maintain the site’s extensive museum collection. My role involves cataloging hundreds of cultural artifacts related to Manzanar, which are physically stored here in Death Valley’s museum storage facility.

While working in the collection, I stumbled across a box of archival documents about Manzanar’s Visual Education Museum. The thought of a museum flourishing at Manzanar puzzled me. I tried to envision creating exhibits within a large-scale prison, surrounded by searchlights and guard towers. A museum, I figured, would be the last thing on an incarcerated individual’s mind.

Yet the archive proves otherwise.

Historical documents reveal incarcerated people’s efforts to transform a dreary barrack into a cabinet of curiosities with displays and rotating exhibitions. According to a memo written by Kiyotsugu Tsuchiya, an incarcerated person and professional curator chosen to direct the operation, the museum’s early days were a constant struggle.

Wind and dust blew through the poorly insulated barracks. The museum’s live specimens, which included an owl, sparrow, and snake, soon died of cold. To make matters worse, a mouse ate the staff’s collection of mounted insects.

Kiyotsugu, however, continued to develop the museum’s visual materials. For months, he wrote to various book publishers and requested free copies of desert field guides to supplement the museum’s science collection.

While camp administrators supported such curatorial endeavors, the completed museum resulted from incarcerated individuals’ own contributions. People from across the camp loaned their personal objects, such as posters, photos, wood carvings, and other handiwork to be put on display.

I’ve always thought of museums as pantheons of human achievement, designed to preserve artworks and other treasures for posterity’s sake. The community’s grassroots efforts at Manzanar, however, suggest that museums can also be places of survival and resistance.

A space of beauty and curiosity, Manzanar’s museum provided a temporary refuge from the grim realities of imprisonment.

Given these wartime circumstances, it is easy to view the Manzanar Visual Education Museum as a unique and isolated tidbit of history. But this story also reveals broader insights about the role of museums in American society.

As a component of Manzanar’s Education Department, the museum’s primary purpose was not necessarily to preserve artifacts, but, rather, to serve a local community. Exhibits such as “Relocation Week” and “Know Your Manzanar” informed the public about the camp itself. By familiarizing incarcerated individuals with their surroundings, the museum’s programming sought to inspire a sense of agency and empowerment.

Manzanar’s Visual Education Museum closed in 1945, following the end of the war. The museum may be history, yet it will be remembered as an example of collective strength. More than a collection of objects, the museum showcases Japanese Americans’ efforts to endure the unendurable.