The art of war

Few things seem more contradictory, yet tied together, than war and art. The North Dakota Museum of Art (NDMOA) finished its second Artists and War exhibit on Sunday. For those who managed to attend, the displays were both horrifying and oddly beautiful. For those who missed the exhibit, the following is a recap of a truly unique experience.

Guillermo Guardia was the artist responsible for the ceramic devils located upstairs at the NDMOA. Bound, beaten, bloody, baby Beelzebubs beg for their lives while armed beastly commando demons enact fighting gorilla hostility. These ceramic renditions were very well done, and their layout was equally creative. Often two commandos were depicted sneaking up on one other, wearing night vision goggles and wielding bazookas; it was hard not to be captivated. "The Playground" as it was called, really conveyed a message that war is nothing more then another game we play.

In the Jean Dean Holland room, artist Johanna Calle ditched traditional drawing tools for bits of metal wire pieced together depicting the pregnant little girls of Bogotá slums that are forced to play head of household. The medium was black wire on a white board, simple lines and wire mesh, but it still conveyed its message. Poor girls forced to hold their pieced together sheet metal slums together.

The room shared space with holographic tombstone epitaphs for NN (No Name) graves covering a wall. As you walk from one side to the other, the images change from flowery headstone depictions to morbid farewell inscriptions. Juan Manuel Echavarria's message was about damage the Columbian drug war has caused, to those persons who were left to die in rivers, left to be food for the vultures and for those persons who remained untraceable. Chaining the images together, the idea was to create abstract depictions for the connected burial vaults. In next room, the Sandy Ryan Gallery, the compiled work of various people hung both on the walls and from the ceiling. White banners decorated with photographs of a dark forgotten moment in North Dakota's history moved with the breeze of passers by. That dirty little secret was the Snow Country Prison, an internment camp located in Fort Lincoln.

Fort Lincoln was built in 1916 and dubbed a concentration camp, a title it held until the dark memory was connected with the name.

Fort Lincoln housed men that the government had deemed "enemy aliens." They were not given a label of honor, they were not soldiers, not men of war; just men who happened to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. For those men who were German-Americans or Japanese-Americans, they were not thrown into these camps because of their nationality, but because the government thought that their loyalty to the country was questionable.

German and Japanese descedents unlucky enough to have been on American soil when World War II started were sometimes shipped to Bismarck. Often starting the journey dressed for a California winter, the German and Japanese arrived in the middle of February in North Dakota. Old photographs and haiku style poetry written by one of the Japanese men detained, Itaru Ina, told the story of the experience: "I live in a country/ without love/ where the roses are red."

Walking through the exhibit with the accompanying guidebook, each photograph and haiku by Ina told the story; the roundup and arrest of Japanese and Japanese Americans and the trained guard dogs "Hooch" and "Waven."

The haikus started horrifically sad and depressing, but always ended on a positive note of beauty; a note of hope. Some of the images could have almost been mistaken for scenes at an adult summer camp. The German prisoners formed a softball team, played on a manmade ski mountain and ran races against each other. The Germans' were brought back down to Earth when the citizens of Bismarck protested that Germans should not be allowed to play an American sport, and the softball team was disbanned.

All that divided those in the Internment camp from the outside world was a fence. The men housed inside that fence could stand and look out upon a residential area, where children no doubt skipped and frolicked, oblivious to the racism and fear contained inside that divider.

Freedom. Wednesday, March 6th, 1946, the final internee departed. Between June of 1941 and March of 1946, 3,850 internees came and went from Fort Lincoln. Their story, considered a blemish on the hard-working memory of previous North Dakotans, would be swept under the rug; not told in the average North Dakota history class. Perhaps, historians have forgotten that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. poetry written by one of the Japanese men detained, Itaru Ina, told the story of the experience: "I live in a country/ without love/ where the roses are red."

Walking through the exhibit with the accompanying guidebook, each photograph and haiku by Ina told the story; the roundup and arrest of Japanese and Japanese-Americans and the trained guard dogs "Hooch" and "Waven."

The haikus started horrifically sad and depressing, but always ended on a positive note of beauty; a note of hope. Some of the images could have almost been mistaken for scenes at an adult summer camp. The German prisoners formed a softball team, played on a manmade ski mountain and ran races against each other. The Germans' were brought back down to Earth when the citizens of Bismarck protested that Germans should not be allowed to play an American sport, and the softball team was disbanneded.

All that divided those in the Internment camp from the outside world was a fence. The men housed inside that fence could stand and look out upon a residential area, where children no doubt skipped and frolicked, oblivious to the racism and fear contained inside that divider.

Freedom. Wednesday, March 6th, 1946, the final internee departed. Between June of 1941 and March of 1946, 3,850 internees came and went from Fort Lincoln. Their story, considered a blemish on the hard-working memory of North Dakotans, would be swept under the rug; not told in the average North Dakota history class. Perhaps, historians have forgotten that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.