Wendy Maruyama, an artist and educator from San Diego, is the author of “Executive Order 9066″ -  a reference to the internment of Japanese Americans due to the proclamation of Executive Order 9066 in 1942, ordering all Japanese American citizens to vacate an area designated as the “exclusion zone” along the West Coast.  Wendy’s work is influenced by personal and family history and addresses the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942. This event dramatically changed the Japanese American psyche and is to this day is still a vague segment of history to most Americans.

Wendy is also the author of The Tag Project, a compilation of 120,000 tags replicated and assembled in ten separate camps.  Each tag has the name of each internee with their ID numbers: this information was taken from the National Archives in Washington D.C. This project, completed with the help of dozens of volunteers, is now an exhibit based at the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego.