‘Egg House’ honors immigrant family’s farm
When Alamo artist Reiko Fujii learned that her family’s farm in Riverside was being sold, she drove down to the Southern California city, dismantled the stand where she’d sold eggs and produce as a child, and brought it all home — wall, door, wagon and clock.
For 15 years she stored it all in her home studio, and now “The Egg House” is back in use, split into two exhibitions under the same name to fit it all in.
“Agrarianaa: Art Inspired by APA Agricultural Roots,” opened in March at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose and opens Thursday, May 2, at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. The door to the egg house is on display in San Francisco, while the wall with all its original decor from the 1940s is in San Jose. The dislocation may be inconvenient to the viewer, but it reflects Fujii’s story.
“I’m bringing to life what my family has gone through as immigrants in this country,” says Fujii, 68. “That includes enduring incarceration during World War II and prejudice and poverty after the war.”
Her family had come from Japan, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 16 people — including the second generation born in California — were pulled off the farm and divvied up in internment camps in California, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas. Luckily, her grandfather had seen it coming and was able to pay off the mortgage before he was
“Agrariarianaa: Art Inspired by APA Agricultural Roots”:
Opening reception 6-9 p.m. Thursday, May 2. Noon-7 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; noon-5 p.m. Saturday. Free. Through May 23. SOMArts Cultural Center, 934 Brannan St., S.F. 415-863-1414. somarts.org; Noon-4 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. Through Sept. 29. $8. Japanese American Museum of San Jose, 535 N. Fifth St., San Jose. www.jamsj.org interned, so he had the farm to return to when he was released.
The land was in shambles after four years of neglect, but the family got it back into shape. It was in the family for another half century until they decided to sell the farm. By then Fujii had both her undergraduate degree and teaching credential from UC Berkeley and was working toward her MFA at John F. Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill.
“I knew for about five years that the farm was going to be sold, so I started documenting it,” she says.
One thing she couldn’t let go was the wall of the egg house, with the scribbling of her grandmother still there after 50 years or more. “It was like her telephone book,” Fujii says. “The writing in chalk made it personal.”
She removed a chunk of wall 12 feet long and 7 feet high, and once she’d committed to that, it was easy to accessorize it with the door, hanging light fixture, signage and a framed poster of President George Washington.
She reassembled the wall and used it as a stage set for performance art, both on location in Riverside and at the JFK University campus in Berkeley. Over the course of the 12-minute performance, Fujii would devolve from herself as a little girl selling eggs into her elderly grandmother, standing beside her. To make that transition, she’d change into the vest that her grandmother knitted at Crystal City detention center in Texas. That vest, with multiple patches, is in the San Jose show along with the egg basket and the Radio Flyer wagon used to haul the eggs in from the coop.
There are 24 other artists involved in “Agrarianaa,” which is sponsored by the Asian American Women Artists Association and the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center. It runs through May 23 to coincide with the United States of Asian America Festival.
“We are trying to tell our stories from different perspectives,” she says, “to show the impact of Asian American immigrants on agriculture in the United States.”