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PW: How about when you received your redress check?

RO: Well, that was a part of, that was helping acquire this space.

PW: Okay, tell me the story.

RO: Okay. Well, what had happened was, I was working in an upstairs loft on H Street on the other side of the tracks, and then while I was working there, what had happened was that then I was doing a body of work and still producing work from the galleries in San Francisco. But meanwhile, then my youngest daughter Miye was going to Bates College in Maine, and she was a Japanese culture major, I can't remember. So then she and her small class, during midterms, was going to go to all the sites they could go to, former sites for the relocation of all these Japanese... and they had gone to Gila. So then after that, about a month later, she says, "Dad, you've got to go to Gila." And here it had been fifty years later, I'd forgotten about that. So I had no desire to go there. It's been, so many years have passed. Said, "No, you've got to do what you've got to do," so then we contacted... what's the guy's name? He's from Glendale, Arizona, he's kind of the person you contact when you go through the Bureau of Indian Affairs because it's on the Pima people's property, but then got the okay with the Department of Interior, and encountered this person who was Japanese American who had been there for a short time until he went into the army. So he's been honored as a part of, instrumental in this thing. So we contacted him and we flew there and he picked us up. We got this van and we drove down to the site and there was a gate that's locked and so on, you walk in there and you're looking at the site. Did I talk about this site? Yeah, but it was the whole experience of being overwhelmed by the smell of sagebrush, oh my goodness, I remember this.

So what happened was I came back after the visit with my daughter, and I was in my studio, the other studio, and I said, "I want to do something." I know they're not going to be paintings, I think they had to be drawings, because drawings are very fragile. They're immediate, and I think this reflects on the moment of that experience. So I'm doing all these drawing, and we're taking watercolor paper, four hundred pound watercolor paper, and I would then size it, because I knew that I'd be working the surface a lot, other than acrylic and other materials. So then I did these drawings of what I remembered and some of the photographs that I'd taken, and I had them on the studio wall, and I was doing research at the library, Dorothea Lange photographs and that kind of thing, and trying to get images. Because I didn't have any images of what I looked like, what my brothers looked like. And so I said, "I want to show them an example of that. And so I did this, and then it happened that the director of the museum here, the Fresno museum, said, "Hey, what are you doing, Robert?" I said, "Well, I'm doing this body of work that I thought I would do." He said, "Well, I'd like to see it." So she came up there, and she looked at it and she didn't say anything at all. She was getting ready to move and she said, "Can the museum borrow these drawings?" Meanwhile what had happened was that I found the drawings individually did not tell the story that there's a narrative about your experience as an internee about this experience that you had about going to the dike and using that, or going to have dinner at the, standing in line, or the train that you saw. So then what happened was that I start putting these papers, drawings together like, of course, that's what it is. So now these drawings are all put together in ways, in sequences of two or three that says what really I experienced. Whereas the individual drawings did not do that. it was very interesting how that happens, the visual narrative that you can talk about, but it doesn't really say what you experienced.

PW: So they were exhibited at the Fresno Art Museum?

RO: They were exhibited at the Fresno Art Museum, they were part of a show called, it was about, they had a traveling show of Anne Frank. So they had all the big cultures, I mean, genocide, but there were pieces that were shown. So since then it's been shot time and time again in various places. In fact, then, what's the woman in San Francisco or the Bay Area that is interested? I noticed at the Japanese National Museum in Los Angeles, I said, "I have these drawings, I would like to donate them to the museum, of my experience." They were not interested. They said, "Well, we're not quite sure." The curator changed over a period of time, but also the person who is the... what's her name? She has, in Oakland, she has some kind of a Japanese American thing that deals with the experience, she had come down when Fresno had the big show at the college about the internment.

PW: Fresno State?

RO: Right. There was a big show and speakers, and she said, "Gee, I really like these," and so on. She says, "I would be interested in having this." I don't know what their institution would be to do with that, because they're not as big as the National Museum, they're not as well-known, so they're still here.

PW: Korematsu.

RO: Yeah, the Korematsu, that's what it is. You may know more about them than I do.

PW: But there's connection to this building with the redress, am I correct?

RO: Oh, yes, yes. We're talking about the money.

PW: The painting, the drawings are also...

RO: I'm sorry, yeah. Some friends were looking for studio space, we looked on the buildings the city owned, and we contacted City Hall and we found that this was the building, if you can imagine this thing with no walls. This is twelve thousand square feet of space, and it was called the Bus Barn, and it had all these roll up doors because the transit companies would use these to transport to the outlying areas of Fresno.

PW: Buses or the...

RO: Well, private transport as well as I think eventually Greyhound maybe used them, or one of them. But anyway, so as a result, things happened, they then closed it down, and when they built the new city hall, they had all these furniture, came out to the tables here, old computers, old cars, this and that, stored back in here, and so we went, "I wonder if we can go ahead and acquire this building." So we went before the city council and says, "We would like to start an art-related activity downtown, and we would like this building to be the central of all the activity and so on. How is it possible to acquire this building?" They said, "Well, we're not quite sure." We contacted the redevelopment agency and talked to them about this building. They said, "Well, no, it's used as storage." And then eventually, one person said, "Well, we're not quite sure. We'd like to retain this whole block because we'd like to entice a hotel to come down here and build, so we want to keep it on hold." So I said, "I don't think we can do that." So we kept after them, and what happens was the idea of the hotel fell through because a bank acquired a part of this space to use as a headquarters, so now the space becomes much smaller. And so we went back with them and they said, "Well, we'd like you to go ahead and contain the asphalt roof." So we foamed the roof, take the paint outside and do this, do that, whatever. Because at that time, thirty thousand people were working downtown. At five, five-thirty, six o'clock, they all jump in their cars and head home. They said, "We want to do something different." So we said, "Let's go ahead, once we acquire this space, turn this thing into a destination where they can have a drink or stop in and look at some artwork before they head home." And so then we said, "How do we do this?" So then once we acquired the space, developed the space, said, "Let's call it ArtHop." So then we put out fliers at the hotel, Barnes & Noble, wherever people gathered, they say, "This is what's happening the first Thursday of every month." Nobody came downtown, I mean, for years on end. Nobody wanted to come down south of Shaw. I mean, it's very interesting how the dynamics in terms of the relationship of downtown, the only people who came downtown was for jury duty or something like that. But we kept at it, open every first Thursday for years.

1995, that's when we started ArtHop. I mean, I talked to people that come to ArtHop, said, "Gee, I didn't know you guys were doing this." I said, "Yeah, we've been doing this since '95." "'95?" Even then, we've got the arts council, Fresno Arts Council, to be a part of this by doing the advertising and the email blast and so on. And even they've tried to claim this whole business of ArtHop, and so everybody wants to take credit for it. So then just recently I've been talking to the council member for this district. I said, "We've been at this for all these years, and we've tried to go and create a group of art-related activities in a central place." We encouraged the other people to come down here and occupy some of these spaces, and so I'm trying, I'm in conversations now with this person saying, "Can we notify, can Fresno define this as a gallery district?" And he said, "Well, we're not quite sure," so he was supposed to call me on Friday. [Laughs] Because all these breweries came up over there, just a block away, now everybody knows that it's the brewery district. So I said, "Well, why can't we have a gallery district?" Anyway.

<End Segment 32> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.