This book provides the first history of the Silk Screen Shop (1943-45) at the Granada War Relocation Center (“Amache”) in Colorado, a World War II incarceration site for Japanese Americans. The Shop printed training posters for the Bureau of Naval Personnel. In addition, in their free time, the Amache workers designed and printed material, such as dance invitations and Christmas cards, for community organizations and individuals. In the years after incarceration, the objects’ connection to the silk-screen shop was lost. This volume documents and studies the objects produced by the Shop, reconstructs workers’ experience and identity, traces the Shop as a site of community, and argues that young adult printmakers collectively developed subversive visual conventions of protest.
1. Introduction: Amache (194245).-
2. The Silk Screen Shop: an Amache
Production Unit.-
3. Working in the Shop: Collaborative Production and
Collective Agency.-
4. Dont Ever Call it a Boat!: Visual Training Aids for
the US Navys Bureau of Personnel.-
5. Community Projects: Hospital Menus,
School Programs, Dance Invitations, and T-Shirts.-
6. Putting Amache on the
Map.- Afterword: The Afterlife of the Prints.
Melissa Geisler Trafton is an art historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century art and visual culture, particularly printed ephemera. Traftons scholarship has appeared in a variety of museum publications and academic journals. In collaboration with the Amache Alliance community organization, she has produced a website that reproduces all known screen prints from Amache.
