My name is Sarah, local artist, born and raised in Denver. Working my way through the art scene art community which is really nice. Most of what I do focuses on the immigrant experience and identity. Most of that is rooted just in my own family history and experience. I'm half Japanese, and all of my family was interned. They were very open about that, and as I grew older, and thinking about what meaningful work I wanted to make, I realized how significant that was in my life and how important it was to share that experience in order to sort of branch out to that universality of the immigrant experience and just being different, or relocating, or displacement. Because really, anyone can relate to that. 

I feel like it's very important for people to realize how similar we are. I like to say we've moved beyond things like internment and racism and government sponsored hate, but unfortunately, we haven't. So I think it's important to just still talk about it all the time. It started with getting to know my own family; I ended up just kind of going through their basement in Chicago, which is where they resettled after internment. And just looking through documents and photos, and asking more questions and getting more details. There's such a difference between hearing it and then reading it in a letter from that moment. My great grandfather ended up being separated from the rest of my family; he was actually held in a POW camp in New Mexico. For two years, they were separated. Looking at his handwriting you can see he’s kind of teaching himself English. 

Now I go through National Archives and government archives and stuff like that–in a similar fashion to going through my own basement, I’m going through other people's basements. So I've gotten into other interned individuals, other prisoners that I don't know personally and trying to research them or represent them. And that's where, that print downstairs, the portrait, it's an Ansel Adams photograph. I've looked at newspaper articles, databases, letters and numbers, all that kind of stuff, trying to expand again to that greater immigrant experience and Black Lives Matter and all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of where I'm at now. 

I'm very glad that I did that and really went into myself first. And even though it's super personal, I think it really opened it up to how important it is and how important personal histories are, and storytelling, and keeping legacies alive and just education about other people's stories.