Day of Remembrance 2025: Henry Sugimoto, Artwork from the Camps

Wed, Feb 19, 6 pm talk by Kristen Hayashi in Abbott Hall, followed by light refreshments  

Free, but advanced registration is required; walk-ins are welcome if space permits. Register here for the program. 

At this year’s Day of Remembrance program, Kristen Hayashi, Director of Collections Management & Access and Curator at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), will speak about the artist Henry Sugimoto. The JANM’s Henry Sugimoto Collection chronicles the artist’s prolific sixty-year career from his travels throughout France and the United States, to his incarceration in the Jerome and Rohwer concentration camps, to his retirement in New York. One of the works in the collection, When Can We Go Home?, is currently on view in The Joslyn’s temporary exhibition, All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840-1955. The painting is one of many works that Sugimoto created about the experiences of Japanese Americans during WWII.  

February 19 is noted as the annual Day of Remembrance for Japanese Americans, which commemorates the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. This order allowed the military to forcibly remove and incarcerate Japanese Americans living on the West Coast.  

Kristen Hayashi, PhD, is Director of Collections Management & Access and Curator at the Japanese American National Museum, where she oversees the permanent collection and curates content through exhibitions and public programs. Previously, she worked at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in various capacities within research and collections, including as part of the curatorial team for the Becoming Los Angeles exhibition. In addition to her work in museums, she is also involved in historic preservation work and has authored several historic cultural monument nominations for buildings in Los Angeles. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Little Tokyo Historical Society and Asian Pacific Islanders in Historic Preservation (APIAHiP). Hayashi earned a PhD in history from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation research examined the return and resettlement of Japanese Americans to Los Angeles in the early post-WWII period.