HIGA, KARIN (19 June 1966–29 October 2013), curator at the Japanese American National Museum and specialist in Asian American art. Higa was among the first curators to bring to light the art and artists that were active while incarcerated in Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. Her work marked a pivotal shift in the untold history of these artists, whose oeuvres were informed and neglected by racial discrimination.
Higa was born to parents Kazuo and Eileen Keiko (née Shigaki) Higa in Los Angeles in 1966. As a child, her father Kaz was interned at Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming. He studied art, design, and art history at Los Angeles City College in 1968, and later taught there. Her parents were involved in the Asian American movement and many Japanese American community organizations. Higa’s formative years were spent in the flourishing Los Angeles arts scene, where her parents nurtured her passion for the arts, education, history, and social justice.
Higa received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Columbia University in 1988, then began working at the New York Foundation for the Arts until 1990, when she was accepted into the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program as a Helena Rubenstein Fellow. While in New York, Higa became one of the first members of Godzilla: Asian American Art Network (founded 1990), an organization that fiercely critiqued art institutions and advocated for the visibility of Asian American artists. Shortly before moving back to Los Angeles in 1991, Higa met Russell Ferguson, who was working at the New Museum at the time. They married in 1997.
Higa’s influential career at the Japanese American National Art Museum (JANM) began in 1991, when she was selected by Karen L. Ishizuka and Robert A. Nakamura to curate the historic exhibition The View from Within: Japanese American Art from the Internment Camps, 1942–1945. The exhibition, which opened at the newly established institution in October 1992, featured 135 artworks created by internees and commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. Higa’s desire to show artistic life at the camps “through the eyes of imprisoned artists” was realized through the compilation of both personal and collective narratives that mapped networks, dialogues, and modes of production across the camps. In response to the critical reception of The View from Within, Higa wrote, “The art that was made during the internment of Japanese Americans . . . was dismissed by young Japanese American activists as not being resistant enough. They claimed that by making ‘pretty pictures,’ rather than overt scenes or signs of protest and resistance, these artists made the internment camps seem like really nice places. Some people felt the pictures of flowers or a mother and child did not adequately capture the horror of the camps. They couldn’t see how these paintings and drawings were critiquing camp life and telling a story—depicting or legitimizing their experiences—or just offering a sense of hope, all of which are active forms of resistance.”
In the years following The View from Within, Higa rose to prominence as a leading thinker and advocate for Asian American and specifically Japanese American Art. Her legacy is remembered for her curatorial passion, collaborative spirit, and her dedication to recuperating significant artists and works from historical neglect.
Higa was diagnosed with cancer in early 2013 while she was enrolled in a doctoral art history program at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation was entitled “Little Tokyo, Los Angeles: Japanese American Art and Visual Culture, 1919–1941.” Higa died on October 29, 2013, at the age of forty-seven. A celebration was held in her honor at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, on December 8, 2013.