BIOGRAPHY
Miné Okubo born in 1912 in Riverside California was a Japanese American artist, writer, and social activist. In her early life Miné Okubo attended Poly High school, and later received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California Berkeley, class of 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 Leager . She collaborated with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in San
Francisco for the Work Progress Administration. While living in Berkeley, California, Okubo had been creating
mosaics for Fort Ord and the Servicemen's Hospitality House in Oakland,
California. 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,
after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Okubo
along with her brother, Toku Okubo, who
had been a student at Berkeley, were relocated to the Japanese internment camp
of Tanforan. Living in a converted horse stall furnished with army cots, they
adjusted to the twice-daily roll calls, curfews and the lack of privacy.
Six months of confinement at Tanforan, Okubo and her brother were transferred
to the Topaz Relocation Center, Utah. Almost never without her sketchpad, Miné
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
collaborated on the April 1944 special issue of Fortune magazine's article on
Japan, a work that included a small number of her drawing it was the first time
any of her work had been published. She stayed in New York, continuing her
career as an artist, for the next half century. She worked as a freelance
illustrator and later resumed painting full time. Following her confinement,
Miné Okubo relocated to New York and published a book of her experiences, Citizen 13660, which
documented, without bitterness, the injustice, and struggle of daily life for
internees at the camps. The book’s name came from the number assigned to her
family unit; the book contains over two hundred of her pen and ink sketches and
with brief explanatory text. It published in 1946 and the book provides a
unique perspective on the historical record of the internment. Miné
Okubo died from illness in February 10, 2001 in Greenwich Village New York City
.