Bright planes of color swim on the surface of this composition, coalescing into a female figure playing an instrument. Miné Okubo used her time in the WPA to experiment with color screenprinting—a process in which ink is dragged across a stenciled screen using a squeegee—which WPA artists taught one another through pamphlets and demonstrations starting in 1938. Okubo’s work for the Federal Art Project ended abruptly in 1942, when she was imprisoned in Tanforan Detention Center in California, followed by Topaz internment camp in Utah. In 1941, Imperial Japan bombed an American naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi. After the attack, the United States government forcibly relocated more than 110,000 Japanese Americans—both U.S. citizens by birth and immigrants—to government camps and facilities, deeming them a threat to national security based solely on their Japanese heritage.