Everett — It is a chapter in our country's history so shameful, we should never forget.
"I didn't know I was Japanese until I was nine," says Jan Hopkins, whose parents hid her ancestry as she grew up in Idaho.
She was there because most of her family was sent to Minidoka internment camp in Idaho during World War II.
Now a mixed media artist, she and her husband, painter Chris Hopkins, just opened their collaborative show "Americans Interned" at Schack Art Center in Everett.
"One of the ironic things is my father was in the Philippines fighting the empire of Japan. And her father was a Japanese American intern. And they got out and I married his daughter," Chris says.
The show features portraits Chris painted of Jan's relatives.
"This brings tears to my eyes to think that this is something that we worked on to honor our family," Jan says.
The exhibit then transitions to a visual narrative of life for Japanese Americans during World War II. A woman clutches a flag. There's a flower impaled on barbed wire. A young boy holding a baseball glove and bat, wearing a Yankees cap, looks perplexed as he stands in front of a wall with "NO JAPS WANTED" scrawled over his shoulder.
There's a wooden trunk Jan's grandfather built in the camp.
"He had some skills. He used what he could find," she says.
Jan's work "Frozen in Time" is made of leaves, bark, seeds and cantaloupe peels. It represents the lives of so many put on hold.
"Americans Interned" runs through September 1.
