Bridge Mural Artists
Erin Shigaki
Erin Shigaki is a descendant of Minidoka survivors, a family who on one side immigrated through Kaua’i and worked on the sugar cane plantations, and on the other side, were tenant farmers in the White River Valley until their incarceration. She is a graphic designer and public artist whose work about the Japanese American incarceration has appeared throughout the Seattle region in the form of murals, sculptures, and exhibits. In service of this work, she is a past recipient of a Densho Artist in Residency and is a current recipient of a Kip Tokuda Memorial Washington Civil Liberties Public Education Grant, as well as a 4Culture Art Project Grant. She is a community activist with the Minidoka Pilgrimage Planning Committee, Tsuru for Solidarity, Seattle Friends of Japantown, and other Seattle Chinatown-International District organizations.
Credit: Julie Kim
Mari Shibuya
Mari Shibuya is a descendant of Manzanar survivors, a family who on one side immigrated through Hawai’i sugar cane plantations before relocating to California, and on the other side, were tenant farmers and flower growers in the San Fernando Valley until their incarceration. Today, they work as a public artist and facilitator. As a facilitator, Shibuya focuses on facilitating spaces for diverse groups of high school-aged youth that center community building using arts-based practices, storytelling, and discussion as avenues to inspire integration, healing and bridge-building. As a public artist, Shibuya has experience conducting multiple large-scale community-based art projects with the size of murals ranging upwards of 3,000 sq/ft. They strive to create work that reflects on our interconnectedness and makes space for us all to contemplate the forces that give rise to our human experience and cultural history. Shibuya is committed to creating spaces where we have the opportunity to focus on our cultural history and the implications our ancestors experience on our present-day experience while highlighting the importance of solidarity and compassion in how we build with one another.
“Our hope is that people who encounter the Bellevue Japanese American Legacy Bridge Span Mural will consider the impact of this history and see the threads and context that gave rise to this moment, so that they may also see the ways that they can create a future where such atrocities never again occur”, say yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese American) artists Erin Shigaki and Mari Shibuya.
“Our interest in the Bellevue Japanese American Legacy Bridge Span Mural Project is based on our commitment to creating spaces of preservation, healing, storytelling, and cultural reclamation for the Japanese American community, and for all Americans. In our work, we also strive to use our moral authority to educate others about and amplify the way that the Japanese American incarceration story intersects with the past and present American legacy of detention, mass incarceration, and stolen resources.”