Afterlives: Japanese American Artists and the Postwar Era

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, South Grand Avenue 250, 90012, Los Angeles

February 28, 2027 – December 31, 2027

*Afterlives: Japanese American Artists and the Postwar Era* is a scholarly exhibition exploring the work of Japanese American artists, photographers, and designers whose lives were profoundly altered by Executive Order 9066 and the wartime incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry on the U.S. West Coast. The exhibition frames their postwar work as acts of survival, resistance, and creative renewal, while also tracing transpacific exchanges and influences that extend beyond a purely U.S. history. By placing these artists in a global conversation about mid-20th-century modernism, it challenges nationalist accounts of postwar art and highlights formal, material, philosophical, and conceptual connections across community, studio, place, and culture.