Near the midpoint of Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America, an inspired new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, a sketchbook sits propped open under glass. It dates from 1947-49, when S. Neil Fujita was a student at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Along the margin of one page, next to a pair of whorled abstractions in earth-toned ink and watercolor, a few thoughts are penned in a tidy hand: “Color could be dominated by either night or day — If nature is everything why not timeless.”
A framed painting on a nearby gallery wall, made by Fujita about a decade later, features a busy plane of geometric shapes, mustardy colors, and evocative yet elusive details. It’s labeled “Composition for album cover design, 1957,” and as the exhibition later reveals, the album in question is Modern Jazz Perspective, by Gigi Gryce and Donald Byrd. It’s just one of about 50 such covers that Fujita designed for Columbia Records in the late-‘50s, including iconic jazz albums like Mingus Ah Um, by Charles Mingus, and Time Out, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. (Fujita’s original artwork for Time Out just sold at Julien’s Auctions today as part of the Dave Brubeck Collection, for $100,000.)
The Barnes exhibition, which opens on Sunday and runs through Jan. 10, 2027, places Fujita alongside five other Japanese-American artists of the mid-20th century: sculptors Isamu Noguchi, Ruth Asawa and Leo Amino; furniture designer George Nakashima; and fiber artist Kay Sekimachi. Pointedly, the show explores how their lives and creative output were shaped by Japanese-American incarceration during the Second World War, which most of them lived through firsthand.
But the show’s curator, Cindy Kang, wasn’t interested only in addressing a historic injustice, or valorizing resilience. “Instead of reckoning such a traumatic experience as an obstacle that they each individually overcame, this exhibition considers the collective impact of that experience on American art and design,” she explained in her prepared remarks at a press preview on Wednesday. “So in other words, the exhibition asks: do the roots of American modernism, in fact, extend into the soil of the Japanese incarceration camps? And more broadly: is the history of Asians in America not peripheral but in fact foundational to American art?”
S. Neil Fujita is just one of the six artists in Noguchi to Asawa, and in terms of name recognition, more peripheral than most. But what he brought to American commercial design truly is foundational, and the Barnes exhibition significantly enlarges the context around his work. It also invites us to more deeply consider his striking contribution to the visual language of jazz.
"The True Shade of America"
Sadamitsu Fujita was born in 1921, to issei (first-generation) immigrant parents, on the Big Island of the Territory of Hawaii; his family lived in the plantation camps of the Waimea Sugar Mill, where his father worked as a blacksmith. He picked up the name “Neil” from a first-grade teacher, later attending boarding school in Honolulu.
When he moved to Los Angeles to enroll in Chouinard, he encountered a new degree of racial othering. In his unpublished memoir, Mouth of Reddish Water, excerpted in the exhibition catalog, Fujita described stumbling upon a patriotic rally on Wilshire Boulevard, and hearing someone yell: “White is the color of America!” Silently, as he recalled, Fujita composed a rejoinder: “What about the other colors of America: black, brown, red, black mixed with white, yellow and white, red and yellow,” culminating in “the color we believe to be the enviable complexion of liberty and justice, the true shade of America.”
Fujita was 20 when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of those deemed a threat to national security. Fujita became one of the roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent sent to camps: first the temporary Pomona Assembly Center, then the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming.
“Black tar-papered barracks, 24 to a block, 120 feet long with two mess halls to a block, the same repeated 30 times, constituted the body of the camp,” he wrote in his memoir. “Beyond the barbed wire was the prairie, which probably served as a campsite for the Sioux nearly sixty-five years ago.”
Heart Mountain, which rises from the floor of the Bighorn Basin, was the most prominent natural feature of the area surrounding the camp. When Fujita became art director for The Heart Mountain Sentinel, a weekly camp newspaper, he created a line drawing of the mountain that served as its masthead until the end of the war. Replicas of the paper’s Jan. 1, 1943 edition are featured in the Barnes exhibition; one headline reads, “10,000 Heart Mountain Residents Greet 1943 With Mingled Feelings.”
Fujita had mixed feelings himself when he enlisted in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the U.S. military. He saw combat in Italy and France, and then re-enlisted to serve with G-2 intelligence as a translator in Okinawa and Manila. After the war, he returned to Chouinard, finishing his studies with help from the G.I. Bill.
His first job out of school was in Philadelphia, with N.W. Ayer & Son in Philadelphia, the nation’s largest advertising agency at the time. During his time there, he worked on a print campaign for the Container Corporation of America, part of their series “Great Ideas of Western Man.” His ad, featuring a quote by Thomas Paine, won a Gold Medal from the Art Directors Club in 1953. The following year, he was offered a job as director of design and packaging at Columbia Records — the label’s first in-house art director.
“I think that I was the first to use painters, photographers and illustrators to do artwork on album covers,” Fujita later reflected in an interview with Voice: AIGA Journal of Design. Whether or not he was the first, there can be no doubt that he incorporated works by artists like Ben Shahn, Milton Glaser, Andy Warhol, and Roy DeCarava. For the cover of Miles Davis’ ‘Round About Midnight, he cropped a Marvin Koner photograph from the Cafe Bohemia, showing Davis bathed in red stage lighting. The Jazz Messengers, from 1956, features an assortment of lively black-and-white photographs of the musicians in the band.
Fujita also incorporated abstract paintings of his own, typically custom-made to suit the music. For example, his painting for Time Out drew inspiration from his travels in Asia, where the Brubeck Quartet had recently traveled; the blue color fields and round shapes were his nod to the album’s opening track, “Blue Rondo à la Turk.”
In a walk-through of Noguchi to Asawa, its designer, Stephanie Goto, divulged that the exhibition borrowed its color palette from the cover of Mingus Ah Um — multiple shades of blue, a faint rose and a deeper rose.
Beyond the Album Cover
Fujita left Columbia Records in 1957, in pursuit of new design challenges. He started his own firm, and took on an array of corporate clients. The exhibition includes a few examples, including an original painting emblazoned with the word “Significance,” which became part of a 1959 print advertisement for the United Aircraft Corporation.
He did some of his most celebrated work in the literary field, designing the jackets for Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (also later adopted for the films) and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Seeking a deeper insight into his new specialty, he attended night classes at Columbia University, to study writing and English literature.
In 1963, Fujita was approached by the public relations firm Ruder & Finn, which was interested in a marriage of graphic design and PR. He agreed to head a subsidiary called Ruder, Finn & Fujita, taking on a number of corporate clients. As Steven Heller and Greg D’Onofrio observe in The Moderns: Midcentury American Graphic Design (Abrams, 2017): “He was responsible for the Today show logo for NBC, the Shubert Organization logo, and the signature typeface for Billboard magazine, among a host of other key objects of design.”
Noguchi to Asawa puts a thoughtful frame around such objects of design: a Noguchi coffee table, a Nakashima lounge chair, a Sekimachi placemat. The exhibition’s final gallery assembles items from all six of its featured artists, arranged to suggest an American midcentury living room. In her introduction to the show’s catalogue, Kang explains: “By featuring objects that were part of postwar American life — from coffee tables to album covers, chairs to wallpaper designs — the exhibition demonstrates that Asian American history is not separate from mainstream America, but rather part of people’s daily lives through these objects in their homes.”
Kang made a similar point in an exhibition walk-through on Wednesday, pausing in front of the final setpiece, a display of album covers and book jackets — including not only Brubeck and Mingus but also Glenn Gould and Eugene Ormandy with The Philadelphia Orchestra. “I point out this wall of Fujita, to end, because I think this brings home the point very well,” she said. “This entire wall of graphic design by Fujita is kind of representative of the way that these artists have disappeared. Everybody knows The Godfather. Nobody knows Fujita.”
This was purposeful overstatement, as she seemed to acknowledge with a slight smile. “Fujita defined the look of American jazz in the mid 20th-century, with his designs for these album covers,” Kang elaborated. “He had an incredible impact on American popular culture with graphic design, particularly for The Godfather, and he has pretty much disappeared as an American artist. And it is my hope with this exhibition that we can recognize these artists who were so important to American art and design, and that have not been given their due.”
Noguchi to Asawa: Designing Postwar America opens at The Barnes Foundation on Sept. 20, and runs through Jan. 10, 2027.
