This book represents an exhibit of 22 fabric artworks that were displayed at the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center in 2016 and made by 17 women of the Textile Artists of the Greater Yellowstone (TAGY), who hail from the Wyoming towns of Cody, Powell, Meeteetse, Lovell, Sheridan and Thermopolis–localities near the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. The Interpretive Center is located on the site of the former Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which unjustly incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. Today, it is a National Historic Landmark site that includes the museum, memorial, walking trail and original camp structures.
Also displayed with these works was a quilt by Naoko Yoshimura Ito, a Japanese American who, as a child, was forcibly removed from her home in 1942, and incarcerated at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center for three years with her family.
The artists featured in this book employed their talents to express experiences, to mark moments, to make meaning of memory, and the pieces boast immense variety in material and method. Ito’s quilt is a meditation on her past, a way to make peace with years of hardship, injustice and loss. The TAGY textiles were made by sewing patches of fabric with personal recollections, emotions felt during tours of the Interpretive Center, and the stories heard on visits here.
These women found ways to stitch together the Japanese American experience and their own lives. The collection presents viewers with traditional techniques of fabric arts in addition to creative processes borrowed from other arts, including collage, origami, dyeing, beading, applique, silk screening and spray painting. The women of TAGY also experimented with fabrics, incorporating vintage silk kimonos, Shibori dyed fabrics and even real barbed wire.
We invite you to explore the many layers within The Fabric of Memory, and the various threads that tie us all to the spirit and stories of the Japanese American experience.
