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Minidoka Snapshots

Roger Shimomura

Maleng Regional Justice Center

A suite of prints depicts a Japanese internment camp during World War II.

Roger Shimomura. Reveille, Minidoka Snapshots, 2010. Lithograph. Maleng Regional Justice Center, Seattle, WA. King County Public Art Collection

Born in Seattle’s Central District in 1939, Roger Shimomura was two years old when he and his family were imprisoned at Minidoka, a Japanese American internment camp in the Idaho desert. One of ten such camps, Minidoka held more than 13,000 Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945.

This suite of six lithographs at the Maleng Regional Justice Center “attempts to capture some essential visual features of the interior camp environment,” Shimomura says, such as the tar paper barracks, barren landscapes, barbed wire, and guard towers that made up Minidoka’s immutable view.
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Roger Shimomura. Exploration, Minidoka Snapshots, 2010. Lithograph. Maleng Regional Justice Center, Seattle, WA. King County Public Art Collection
Roger Shimomura. The Enemy, Minidoka Snapshots, 2010. Lithograph. Maleng Regional Justice Center, Seattle, WA. King County Public Art Collection
Roger Shimomura. Block 6, Minidoka Snapshots, 2010. Lithograph. Maleng Regional Justice Center, Seattle, WA. King County Public Art Collection

About the Location

Maleng Regional Justice Center

The Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, WA, contains one of the most significant collections of public artwork ever commissioned by King County for a single facility. The collection includes architecturally integrated and site-specific installations as well as many diverse portable artworks— drawings, paintings, photographs, and prints—created especially for the site by Northwest artists. Beginning…

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