Should Designers Try to Reform Immigrant Detention?

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to round up people of Japanese descent on the West Coast and confine them in camps inland. The Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) was a resident of New York at the time, so he was exempt from the order. But he did something unusual in response: He decided to intern himself.

After talking with the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who encouraged the idea, Noguchi drove himself to the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona and checked himself in. He hoped to start an arts-and-crafts program for his fellow internees and make conditions in the camp more humane. “I felt this war very keenly, and wished to serve the cause of democracy in the best way that seemed open to me,” he had written in an essay before leaving for Poston.