The Japanese American National Museum will present a virtual talk, “Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection,” on Thursday, April 30, from 6 to 7 p.m. PDT.

Dive into the experience of traveling across the country with the “Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection” special display with program developer and curator Clement Hanami in this live presentation and Q&A.

Allen Hendershott Eaton’s historic 1952 book, “Beauty Behind Barbed Wire: The Arts of the Japanese in Our War Relocation Camps,” explored art and craft objects created by persons of Japanese descent while wrongfully incarcerated in the World War II American concentration camps. After many years of lying forgotten in storage, the collection was inherited by a family friend of Eaton’s, who in April 2015 attempted to put it up for auction.

An outcry arose from Japanese American community leaders and activists, who rallied successfully to stop the insensitive sale of these important artifacts of Japanese American history. Ultimately, the collection was transferred to JANM for safekeeping.

Now a traveling display, both physically and digitally, “Contested Histories” is intended to help gather information about each individual object so that the museum’s efforts to preserve and catalog the collection can be as complete as possible.

This public program is free and open to all. Go to JANM’s YouTube channel on to watch it live on http://youtube.com/janmdotorg.

Subscribe to JANM’s YouTube channel in order to be notified when the video is streaming live. You can also follow JANM on social media (jamuseum: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

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