b'FIGURE \x0b Tom Nakashima, Clouds, Fish, Stick and Cage, 1992. Oil and gilding on byobu, 35x 72inches. Collection ofRandy Jayne Rosenberg and Joel Makowerits trap door gaping open, while considering whether to approach and enter. Nakashima introduced the rectangular poultry cage to his cache of imagery after viewing an exhibition on the internment at the Smithsonians National Museum of American History. Finding the US governments cynical explanation that the camps were supposed to provide sanctuary for [his] relatives in a hostile domestic environment to be deeply ironic, Nakashima attested that the cage forthrightly represents the Sanctuary revealed for what it really was. 17The use of masks for ceremonial, ritual, religious, performative, expressive, and aesthetic functionsor for concealment as disguise, masquerade, and camouflagespans human history. As an influence, subject, and metaphor in modern and contemporary art forms, mask-making practices have an extensive provenance. They are the central motif in Makuuchis cryptic 1986 print, We and the Gods Wear a Sybil-Zoidal Mask to be Ourselves, and Behind Them, Ancestors Demand Voices (fig. 54), begun while the artist was living in Nigeria. Amid a conglomeration of traditional and invented masks bearing a spectrum of racial and ethnic features, Makuuchi also inserts an enigmatic personal reference: a white female figure grasping a mask bearing his conservative Japanese fathers stern visage. Idiosyncratically entangling symbols of world religions, a mask of insanity hovers above the phantasmagoric array to denote how the artist came to consider belief [to be] the dirtiest word in the dictionary because so much FIGUREWe and the Gods Wear a Sybil-Zoidal Mask to be Ourselves, and Behind Them, Ancestors Demand Voices, 1986. Drypoint. 20 x 29 inches. Collection of Jamie and Constance Makuuchi. 136'