New York City-based artist and designer Dana Tanamachi has learned from the art of her ancestors that “you can make something beautiful from whatever you have.” It’s also what she’s learned from their challenges.
The legacies of her grandmother and great-grandmother have especially shown her “gaman,” a Japanese term meaning “to endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.”
“This concept has now become an heirloom passed down through the matriarchs in my family,” said Tanamachi in a March 7 keynote presentation at RootsTech 2025.
Legacies of perseverance
In 1942, after the attack on Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor the previous December, 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in remote internment camps despite no evidence of wrongdoing.
“For three long years, they endured harsh conditions, the loss of their rights and freedom, and the deep injustice of being treated as enemies in their own beloved homeland,” said Tanamachi.
Yet the band of 18,000 sent to an internment camp in the Arizona desert “began to organize themselves into departments — teachers, doctors and nurses, mess hall cooks and farmers. They began to build a sense of community and order among the chaos.”
Mitsuye “Mitzi” Nimura worked in the sewing department while her mother, with a knack for crafting, would create art, like flowers made of bread dough or tiny umbrellas made of toothpicks and cigarette wrappers.
“It has always impressed me how she was able to create such beautiful things out of the most mundane mediums, even scraps and trash,” said Tanamachi. “I’ve always admired how my elders made the best with what they had.”
Mitzi Nimura — Dana Tanamachi’s grandmother — married Tom Tanamachi, whom she met in the internment camp. The couple did all they could after being released from camp to create a happy childhood for their three boys despite limited resources.
Mitzi Tanamach would also carry on her mother’s legacy by making beautiful creations out of whatever was available.
“I recall dresses made from potato sacks, adding her own flair with embroidery and sequin details, and she would make handbags from leftover carpet scraps and denim skirt sets out of old pairs of jeans.”
Tanamachi added: “She put so much love into every piece. I remember feeling so proud wearing her custom creations, and she allowed me to transform into anything my heart desired.”
‘The audacity to create beauty’ through bleak circumstances
Since creating a popular chalk-lettering installation in Brooklyn, New York, in 2009, Tanamachi has been commissioned to create art for clients like Target, Nike, Instagram, Time magazine and O, The Oprah Magazine.
The project Tanamachi is “perhaps most proud of,” though, sprouted from her greatest pain.
While undertaking the task of creating over 500 pieces of art for the ESV Illuminated Bible, “the duration of this project happened to coincide with the most difficult period of my life to that point” as she struggled with depression.
She said: “The beauty that adorns these pages was born of some of the deepest pain I have experienced. And creating in the midst of what felt like internal chaos was something I wasn’t convinced I could do.”
Yet Tanamachi found strength in the perseverance of her ancestors.
“As difficult as it was to be productive and tap into my creativity in this dark season, creating in the midst of bleak circumstances was something I had seen done before. I had a template, a road map, that proved essential when I couldn’t see the road in front of me. And you all know I’m talking about two women whose blood runs through my veins, whose legacies live on in my bones.”
Leaning on their example, Tanamachi learned she can do hard things too, adding her own legacy of perseverance to that of her loved ones.
“And for now,” she said, “I will continue in the footsteps of women in my family whose quiet strength gave them the audacity to create beauty even in the midst of dire and bleak circumstances.”
