Hisako Hibi

Hisako Hibi was born on May 14, 1907, in Torihama, a farming village located in the Fukui Prefecture, Japan. Hibi was born into a Buddhist family.[1][2] She was the eldest of six children and stayed with her grandmother after her parents moved to the United States. Upon joining her parents in Seattle, Washington in 1920, the Hibi family moved shortly thereafter to Los Angeles, California.[3] On account of her father's business success, Hibi's family returned to Japan in 1925.[2] Hibi remained in California, graduating from Lowell High School in San Francisco, California in 1929, where she'd begun creating art and learning English.[2]

Following graduation, Hibi studied western-style oil painting at the California School of Fine Arts and participated in annual exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Association.[4][5] She has exhibited with fellow artists including Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Karl Kasten, and Earle Loran, all of whom are renowned and were active in California in the early 1930s and 1940s.[4][6]

While at the school, she met fellow student and painter George Matsusaburo Hibi, who was more than twenty years her senior, and the two were married in 1930.[3] In 1933, the couple moved first to Mount Eden, and then to Hayward, California, where they raised their children, Ibuki Hibi Lee and Satoshi Hibi.

Hisako Hibi awaits evacuation with her son, Satoshi, and daughter, Ibuki, in Hayward, California on 8 May 1942, by Dorothea Lange for the WRA

In 1942, over 100,000 Japanese Americans underwent mandatory displacement of life, vocation, and recreation through the Executive Order 9066.[7] With forced removal imminent, Hibi and her husband donated their paintings to different venues in the Hayward community, to express their thanks because they couldn't bring the work with them to internment camps for the duration of World War II.[8] The Hibi family was first moved to the Tanforan Assembly Center in May and then to a more permanent camp at Topaz, Utah in September. The family's eviction was documented by photographer friend Dorothea Lange, who captured Hibi with her daughter Ibuki standing aside mountains of luggage on 8 May 1942 as they waited for the buses that would take them to the assembly center.[9]

Japanese Americans experiencing internment camps around America used artwork to visualize their experiences, including Hisako Hibi.[10] While raising her two children in the camp, she would ocument her experiences through her paintings, an example being Laundry Room (1944).[11] The painting depicts how the camp bathing facilities were inadequate for the inmates, which resulted in the mothers improvising a bathing area by washing their children in the laundry room.[12]

After the war, the Hibis relocated to New York City. When George Hibi died in 1947, Hibi took up work as a seamstress in a garment factory to support herself and her children. She later returned to school, studying under Victor D'Amico at the Museum of Modern Art which influenced her painting style, becoming increasingly abstract.[13]

In 1953, Hibi became a U.S. citizen, taking advantage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.[14] A year later, she moved back to San Francisco with her daughter, Ibuki Hibi Lee, while her son, Satoshi Hibi, went to Utah for college.[15] She remained there until her death in 1991. In 1954, Hibi worked as a housekeeper for Marcell Labaudt, directed the Lucien Labaudt gallery. During this time, she was able to work in a studio in Labaudt's garage.[13] Labaudt presented the work of both Hisako Hibi and her husband George Matsusaburo Hibi at the Lucien Labaudt gallery, with Hisako's work being shown in 1970 and her husband's in 1962.[1]

Hibi exhibited widely in the Bay Area in the postwar years, where her first solo exhibit was held at the Lucien Labaudt gallery in 1970.[16] In 1985, the San Francisco Arts Commission presented Hibi with an Award of Honor, and mounted a major solo exhibition Hisako Hibi, Her Path at the Somar Gallery. She was an early member of the Asian American Women Artists Association.[3][12]

Art was important to Hibi, in which it kept her at peace and happy after the struggles she went through in the U.S.[13] Post internment, Hibi's artwork and approach to artistic expression in paintings evolved and improved. She abandoned sketching all together in her process, instead favoring paint worked directly onto canvas. In her most recent work, Hisako Hibi's art style became more abstract, for example, one of her six post-war paintings Autumn (1970).[12]Hibi died on October 25, 1991, in San Francisco, at the age of 84.

Hibi's memoir, Peaceful Painter: Memoirs of an Issei Woman Artist was edited by her daughter, Ibuki H. Lee, and published posthumously in 2004 by Heyday Books, along with an accompanying exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum.[3] Hibi's granddaughter, Amy Lee-Tai, wrote a children's book based on the experiences of the Hibi family in Topaz.[26]

Although Hibi's art has featured in many well known ehibits, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[27] much of it has been lost or displaced. A neighbor from Hayward, who stored several of the family's paintings during internment, died in 1954, depleting what is known to be left of Hibi's early works.[2] Lee recounted finding selections from Hibi's internment artwork in online marketplaces and garage sales.[28][2]

Of the seventy-two remaining paintings that Hibi created while interned, one is in the collection of the Oakland Museum of California, one was given to the San Francisco Buddhist Church, seven are in a private collection, and sixty-three were donated to the Japanese American National Museum between 1996 and 1998.[14] Some of the works that George Hibi created while interned are stored at UCLA.[29]

• Lange, Dorothea; Kitagaki Jr., Paul (4 June 2012). "THEN and NOW: Ibuki Hibi Lee". Kitagaki Photo. Retrieved 15 September 2015.
• "Hisako Hibi — WWII Relocation Record". JapaneseRelocation.org. 2015. Retrieved 17 September 2015.