September 10–November 14, 2026
Opening reception: Thursday, September 10, 5–7pm
they never asked
By Sen Taro, a poet incarcerated by the U.S. Wartime Civil Control Administration in the 1940s
suspicious or not –
just put us away
The exhibition they never asked looks at systematic, racialized patterns of U.S. immigration enforcement and confinement and considers how erasure can be met with documentation and creativity. The data visualization project, Mapping Deportations, traces over 200 years of American policies targeting non-white migrants for exclusion. These ideas will be explored firsthand through the story and artwork of Wheaton alumna and artist Momo Nagano (Class of 1947), who was incarcerated at Manzanar, an American concentration camp, during World War II and through Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh’s ongoing and site-specific Index of the Disappeared, an archive detailing the censorship, detentions, and data blackouts facing immigrant and dissenting communities in the post-9/11 era. We will also include a local book project by Honora Spicer and Giancarlo Huapaya, Immigration Detention in Rhode Island from Origins to End: A Brief History, created with the AMOR Community Response Team which will help us consider ways to respond to current injustices.