Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President

Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President is an evening with artist Marina Berio centering her recent artist book, an epistolary reckoning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 and Berio’s family stories of incarceration. The evening will open with a reading and presentation, followed by a conversation with Shirley Ann Higuchi, JD, of Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation. Together they will explore family photography, visual history, and the role of creativity in incarceree resilience, situating the project within an urgent context of state power, surveillance, and exclusion.

Structured as an artist’s letter written from the present to FDR’s burial site beneath his mother’s rose garden at Springwood, Ten Photography Lessons unfolds through a series of meditations on the photographic record and its efficacy or failure at relating the truth of the incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Beginning with her grandfather’s detainment for photographing clouds, Berio traces a lineage of images lost, burned, or never taken, and foregrounds figures such as Toyo Miyatake, George Hirahara, and Yone Kubo, who risked punishment to document life behind barbed wire. Self-published in an edition of 250, Ten Photography Lessons draws a resonant line from FDR’s wartime policies to contemporary exercise of executive power, illuminating how the past continues to reverberate in the present.

BIOS

Marina Berio is a visual artist from New York who works with drawings and photography to convey aspects of visual experience that are intimate and visceral. She has printed family pictures with her own blood and rendered photographic negatives as large-scale charcoal drawings. A more recent project, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was shot on the walls of her studio and expresses the interrelationship between the nested realities of mental space, creative process, the internal topography of the body, and the surfaces of the studio itself. Berio’s artist’s book about her family and the pictorial record of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, has been presented at RISE in the Rockaways, New York, and at the book fairs of the International Center of Photography and Penumbra Foundation in New York City.

Aside from the Guggenheim, Berio has also been awarded Pollock/Krasner Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts grants, and visited various residencies including the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Millay in the US, and Shiro Oni and Plüschow in Japan and Germany. Her work was recently included in a large historical survey of materiality in Photography at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; and she has had solo shows at Galerie Miranda in Paris, France; Galería Phuyu in Buenos Aires; Michael Steinberg Fine Art, and the OFF Triennale in Hamburg. Berio studied visual art and art history at Oberlin College, then completed her MFA at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Berio teaches at the International Center of Photography in New York, and is a founding member of PAIN, the activist group founded by Nan Goldin to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in creating the opioid crisis.

Shirley Ann Higuchi, JD, chair of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF), is the daughter of former incarcerees, the late Dr. William I. Higuchi and the late Setsuko Saito Higuchi. Her American born parents were children when they were incarcerated at Heart Mountain during WWII. Shirley’s pursuit of law stemmed from her feelings of discomfort toward how the U.S. judicial system treated her parents. It was not until her mother was on her deathbed in 2005 that Shirley would aspire to take on her mother’s dream of “having something built there.” She was elected Chair of the Board in 2009 and her proudest moment was unveiling the Foundation’s world-class Interpretive Center in August, 2011 alongside journalist Tom Brokaw, the late Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Secretary Norman Mineta and Senator Alan K. Simpson. The Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation also opened the Mineta Simpson Institute in July 2024 which was expertly guided by her vision. Her book, Setsuko’s Secret: Heart Mountain and the Legacy of the Japanese American Incarceration published by the University of Wisconsin Press is now available at your favorite bookseller. For more information go to: www.setsukossecret.com

In addition to her work with Heart Mountain, Shirley is currently the first Asian American President of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, established in 1871, and formerly an attorney with the American Psychological Association. She was also the first Asian American to serve as President of the mandatory DC Bar in 2003. In 2008, Shirley was appointed to the Judicial Tenure and Disabilities Commission for a 6-year term where she was responsible for reviewing misconduct, evaluating reappointments, and conducting fitness reviews of the District’s judges. Shirley was appointed by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) to the Federal Law Enforcement Nominating Commission, where she recommended judicial applicants for the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. In December 2024, Shirley was awarded the BADC’s Lawyer of the Year award.

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