Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp

The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (NEHMA) at Utah State University’s Caine College of the Arts announces “Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp: The Watercolors and Words of Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey,” a talk by the artist and author. Havey will speak Sept. 30 at 4:30 p.m. at NEHMA.

In her newly published memoir, Havey combines storytelling, watercolor and personal photographs to recount her youth in two Japanese American prison camps during World War II. Through short vignettes — snapshots of people, recreated scenes and events — she shares her memories of becoming a teenager inside these camps. Vintage photographs reveal the historical, cultural and familial contexts of that growth and of the Nakai family’s dislocation. They portray the recollected lives of her mother and father in Japan and then America where they began their arranged marriage and had two children.

The University of Utah Press says Havey’s vivid and poignant watercolors depict decades-old memories and dreams and reflect moments of daily camp life illuminated by the author’s adult perspective. They also say her paintings and her animated writing draw readers into a turbulent era when America disgracefully incarcerated, because of their race and without due process, thousands of American citizens.

“The writing is at times highly evocative, but it is the addition of Havey’s artwork that sets this work apart from and adds a new dimension to the Japanese concentration camp story,” said Nancy Matsumoto, writer and contributor to Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. “Havey includes numerous small details that make the period come alive and shed new light on the prison camp experience.”

The artist and author talk is sponsored by the Utah Humanities Council, USU Uintah Basin campus, USU departments of history and English, the Asian Studies Program and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art.

The talk is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the CCA Box Office located in room 139-B of the Chase Fine Arts Center on USU’s Logan campus, call 435-797-8022 or see the college’s Production Services website.

Related links:

Hear “Lily Havey on Life in and After an Internment Camp,” Access Utah, Utah Public Radio

USU’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art

USU Caine College of the Arts

Contact: Denise Albiston, 435-797-1500, denise.albiston@usu.edu

Writer: Whitney Schulte, 435-797-9203, whitney.schulte@usu.edu