Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo

7/3/2026

Using her own strikingly vivid artwork, accomplished painter Estelle Ishigo tells us of her times of internment during the Second World War. She was an American citizen who had married a Japanese-American named Arthur and they lived amidst a thriving community until Pearl Harbour was bombed. The knee-jerk reaction of Uncle Sam at the time was to round up everyone with a Japanese sounding name, or with antecedence from there, and put them in holding camps. She refused to be separated from her husband, so joined him at the camp where they were treated as prisoners in all but name. Their status of "protective arrest" saw them surrounded by a barbed wire fence, fed in refectories and housed in huts that wouldn't have looked out of place in "The Great Escape" (1963). Not long after the States j