Events
Cemetery Monument at Manzanar, California, One of Ten Concentration Camps in the U.S. That Incarcerated Over 120,000 Americans of Japanese Descent During WWII (2009), Robert A. Nakamura.
Documentary photograph of Manzanar cemetery monument; relates to Nakamura’s seminal experimental and community documentary film Manzanar.
© Robert A. Nakamura
On-site programs are free for Members and included with admission for visitors, unless otherwise noted.
Several of the exhibition-related programs will be held off-site. Please check each program description for location and price.
To see a complete listing of the Museum’s programs, visit janm.org/events.
No upcoming events.
Exhibition Closing
Gallery Talk
Nobuko Miyamoto What Can a Song Do?
Location: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, 90028.
Admission: General admission $10.00 / students $5.00 / FREE for LACE or JANM members. Tickets available at the door.
Together with a group of guest musicians and activists from the 1960s/‘70s and the present, Miyamoto brings alive the dynamic moment when her 1973 album “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle of Asians in America,” created a heartbeat for the Asian American Movement and shared rhythms with Black, Latino, and Native American cultural and political activists.
Organized by: Japanese American National Museum and LACE.
Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980)
Location: David Henry Hwang Theater, Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso Street, Los Angeles
Admission is free!
Screening of a new 16mm print of this cinematic landmark, the first feature film produced by and about Asian Americans. Oda, an elderly bachelor living in Little Tokyo, chronicles the stories of the Japanese American community from the turn of the century to the 1970s. A Q&A with Director Robert A. Nakamura and John Esaki (co-writer) will follow the screening.
Co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum and Visual Communications. Special thanks to the Academy Film Archive.
Drawing the Line: Panel Discussion
This program is generously sponsored by California Community Foundation, The Getty Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The Aratani CARE grant, Asian American Studies Center, UCLA.
Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980: Visual Communications
Location: Downtown Independent Theater, 251 S. Main Street, LA 90012, 213.617.1033
For more information, visit www.lafilmforum.org or alternativeprojections.comClick here for parking info.
$10 general, $6 students/seniors, free for Filmforum, Visual Communications , and Japanese American National Museum members. Tickets can be purchased here.
In the course of media art in Los Angeles, the late 1960s and 1970s brought a rise in the possibilities of media access for minority groups that generally did not have access to the tools of cinema or control of how they were presented in mass media. Much of this critical work came out of the EthnoCommunications program at UCLA, formed in 1968, which worked to bring in African American, Asian American, Chicano, and Native American students. The remarkable work of the African American students is the focus of the L.A. Rebellion series at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, also part of Pacific Standard Time. This program highlights the documentary-focused early years of Visual Communications (VC), an organization created by a group of visionary Asian American filmmakers, educators, and activists from the EthnoCommunications program.
VC’s founders — Duane Kubo, Robert Nakamura, Alan Ohashi, and Eddie Wong — incorporated the organization in 1970 on the heels of a groundbreaking photographic exhibition about Japanese American internment assembled by Nakamura and Ohashi entitled "America's Concentration Camps." (The modular exhibit, popularly referred to as "The Cubes Exhibit," is currently on display at the Japanese American National Museum as part of their show “Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design & Activism in Post-War Los Angeles.”) The foursome envisioned Visual Communications as a filmmakers' collective that sought to re-represent the history and culture of Asian Pacific Americans, use media for social change, and train future generations of Asian Pacific American filmmakers. The first such organization in the United States, VC continues to engage in community-based filmmaking through training, education and filmmaker support initiatives, public screening and exhibitions programs including the annual Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, and film/video preservation activities. VC is also home to one of the largest repositories of photographic and moving image archives on the Asian Pacific experience in America. http://www.vconline.org/
In person: Robert Nakamura, Eddie Wong, Duane Kubo, and Alan Kondo!
Co-presented by the Japanese American National Museum