Masumi Hayashi
Masumi Hayashi was a notable artist recognized for her impactful photographic collages that often focused on the landscapes and remnants of World War II-era Japanese American internment camps. Born in the Gila River Relocation Camp in Arizona, she later channeled her personal history into her art, which reflects a strong commitment to social justice and a critique of racism, especially against Asian Americans. Hayashi earned her BA and MFA in art and became a professor of photography at Cleveland State University, where she played a key role in modernizing the Art Department. Her work is characterized by innovative panoramic photography that captures urban decay and environmental issues, often provoking discussions about the intersection of industry and nature.
A significant part of her oeuvre is the "American Concentration Camp" series, which memorializes the internment experience through fragmented landscapes that juxtapose beauty with historical trauma. Hayashi's photographs are included in prestigious museum collections worldwide and have been featured in various exhibitions that highlight important social themes. Tragically, she and another artist were murdered in 2006, but her legacy endures through her art and contributions to preserving the narratives of Japanese American internment. Hayashi's work serves as a poignant reminder of the complexities of human experience and the necessity of reflecting on painful histories to prevent their recurrence.
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Subject Terms
Masumi Hayashi
Artist
- Born: September 3, 1945
- Place of Birth: Gila River Relocation Camp, Rivers, Arizona
- Died: August 17, 2006
- Place of Death: Cleveland, Ohio
Best known for her images of World War II–era Japanese American internment camps, Masumi Hayashi specialized in photographic collages of landscapes and objects that others might view as ugly. These works reflected her interest in social justice and her resistance to racism, particularly as directed at Asian Americans.
Areas of achievement: Art
Early Life
Masumi Hayashi was born in the Gila River Relocation Camp in Arizona, an internment camp for Japanese Americans set up by the US government during World War II. Although Hayashi had no memory of her infancy in this camp, she later incorporated the experience into her artwork. She grew up in the predominantly African American neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles, helping her parents at their small neighborhood store on Compton Avenue. After attending the University of California, Los Angeles for a short while, she married a naval officer during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Hayashi subsequently earned a BA and MFA in art from Florida State University in 1975 and 1977.
Life’s Work
A friendly, small-framed woman, Hayashi was known to skateboard down hallways in her younger days. She began work at Cleveland State University in 1982 as a professor of photography, in which capacity she helped the Art Department transition into the digital age. Many of her photographs and collages from this time period focus on the flavor of the city of Cleveland, taking note of its pollution, urban decay, and industrial activities. These photographs act as an entry point into discussions about the relationship between industry and the environment.
Hayashi described her artistic method as a form of mapping. By moving her camera incrementally at a fixed level, Hayashi would create a 360-degree panoramic band of the view around the camera. Repeating the process allowed her to create additional panoramic bands to fit above or below each other, which she would then arrange in the order of their exposure to form large-scale, tiled panoramic strips. As many as 150 separate prints could then be mounted edge to edge, forming collages.
Hayashi produced art that reflected her commitment to social justice. Although she mostly photographed landscapes or buildings, a major theme of her work involves various expressions of human violence. In the 1990s, Hayashi’s panoramic photographs of the buildings connected with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II allowed her to combine an artistic pursuit with a personal one. Termed the American Concentration Camp series, this set of photographic collages represents her best-known work. Hayashi used her landscapes to focus a critical view on the relationship between social and political conditions. Through the collage of fragmented views that reconstructs the whole, each photograph memorializes a historical moment, providing a glimpse into life at such places as the Manzanar Relocation Camp, for example. For many years, little discussion about internment took place within or outside of Japanese American communities. Hayashi added the comments of residents of the internment camps to the presentation of her photographs to further illuminate this example of government-sponsored racism, subverting the beauty of the desolate landscapes with the memory of the camps’ original purpose.
Hayashi’s photographs are found in major museum collections around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and in many private collections as well. Her major exhibitions include EPA Superfund Sites at the Akron Art Museum in 1992, Post-Industrial Landscapes at the Florida State University Art Gallery in 1993, and War Works at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1995. Hayashi also participated in an exhibition titled The Language of Place in 1994 that featured her photographs of Japanese American internment camps. The exhibition began in Ohio at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus before traveling to the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan.
Hayashi and John Jackson, another artist, were fatally shot on August 17, 2006, in her Cleveland apartment. Another resident of her apartment building, Jacob Cifelli, pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. He cited noise as the reason for the murders. A traveling retrospective of her work, Masumi Hayashi, Meditations, appeared in 2007 at the Akron Art Museum, Cleveland State University, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.
Her son, Dean A. Keesey, maintained an online museum showcasing her work. The nonprofit organization Densho credits Hayashi with helping to keep the stories of Japanese Americans incarcerated at camps during World War II alive.
Significance
Hayashi contributed significantly to the issue-oriented photography and photograph-based art of the late twentieth century. She is remembered for finding and capturing beauty in subjects often considered ugly, such as toxic-waste repositories or abandoned prisons. However, Hayashi’s photographs do not sentimentalize or romanticize their subjects, but instead encourage a contemplative state of mind and engagement with human failure and suffering. Hayashi’s work, particularly the series on the Japanese American internment camps, requires the viewer to consider what brought these spaces into existence and what is needed to prevent such ugly places from appearing in the future.
Bibliography
Bole, Mary Jo, et al. Local Flavor: An Exhibition of Four Artists at the Art Gallery, Cleveland State University. Cleveland: Cleveland State U, 1983. Print.
Coleman, A. D., et al. Masumi Hayashi, Meditations. Cleveland: Cleveland State U, 2007. Print.
Lew, Michele. "Hayashi, Masumi." Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, 29 Aug. 2022, case.edu/ech/articles/h/hayashi-masumi. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.
Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 2002. Print.
"Welcome!" Masumi Hayashi Museum, www.masumimuseum.com/index.php. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.
Niiya, Brian. "Sights Unseen: The Photographic Constructions of Masumi Hayashi (Exhibition)." Densho Encyclopedia, 16 Jan. 2024, encyclopedia.densho.org/Sights‗Unseen:‗The‗Photographic‗Constructions‗of‗Masumi‗Hayashi‗(exhibition)/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.
Rogers, Sara J. The Language of Place. Columbus: Ohio Arts Council, 1995. Print.