Lambertville, NJ:  The Rago Arts and Auction Center hosts an open house on Wednesday, April 15 featuring author/professor Eric Muller speaking on his latest book, Colors of Confinement at 6 p.m.

In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were taken from their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a technology then just seven years old, to capture community celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment. Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee.  In this talk, Muller uses Manbo's images both to illustrate one family's experience of injustice and to challenge commonly held understandings of the nature of the Japanese American camps.

Eric Muller holds the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professorship of Law in Jurisprudence and Ethics and is the Director of the Center for Faculty Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He joined the Carolina Law faculty in 1998 after four years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law.  Muller received his A.B. from Brown University and his J.D. from Yale Law School.  He has published articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review, among many other academic journals. His book Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters of World War II was published in August of 2001 by the University of Chicago Press, and was named one of the Washington Post Book World's Top Nonfiction Titles of 2001. His second book, American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in October of 2007.  His most recent book is Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II, which in 2013 won the Western History Association's Joan Patterson Kerr Award for the Best Illustrated History of the American West.

A book signing will follow the lecture.

The auction house opens on Wednesday, April 15 at noon. A reception begins at 5 p.m. Eric Muller will speak at 6 p.m.

RSVP to 609.397.9374 ext. 119 or raac@ragoarts.com. If you unable to RSVP in advance, please join us if you can; all are welcome.

Sponsored by Ascentin Personal Insurance (A Division of Brown & Brown, Inc.).

TO THE EDITOR

High-resolution image available on request.

About Rago Arts and Auction Center

Rago is a leading U.S. auction house with $30 million in annual sales. It serves thousands of sellers and buyers yearly with a singular blend of global reach, personal service and competitive commissions for single pieces, collections and estates. Rago holds auctions of 20th/21st c. design, fine art, decorative arts, furnishings, jewelry, Asian, militaria, coins and currency, silver, historic ephemera, and ethnographic property. Rago also provides a range of appraisal services conducted by USPAP (Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice) compliant appraisers, performed to the highest standards set by the IRS, insurers and the Appraisers Association of America. Rago is located in New Jersey, midway between New York City and Philadelphia.

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