The Eaton Collection: Off the Block at Rago

By Rebecca Krishnan-Ayer

The Contested Sale

The New Jersey-based auction house Rago Arts and Auction Center (est. 1988) stirred controversy with the April 2015 projected sale of 450 works of art and artifacts from the Japanese-American internment camps established during World War II. In the wake of the New York Times article announcing the auction, activists and community leaders alike banded together to ignite a social media campaign against the auction house, whose annual sales total approximately $30 million. Rago initially stood behind their decision to proceed with the sale, citing a lack of alternate options available to the client for relinquishing the items. As the New York Times reported, “A spokeswoman for Rago wrote in an email that the unnamed auction consignor, who knew the Eaton family, is ‘not in a financial position’ to donate the material to institutions and ‘did not feel qualified to choose one institution over another.’ The consignor has described the protests as a ‘social media attack’ meant to ‘bully us into compliance with their demands.’”

Meanwhile, protest groups established a Facebook page, “Japanese American History: NOT for Sale,” assembling over 6,700 followers. Critics also launched a Change.org petition, lambasting “the betrayal of those imprisoned people who thought their gifts would be used to educate, not to be sold to the highest bidder in a national auction, pitting families against museums against private collectors.” Among those issuing a rallying call for action was Japanese American actor George Takei, who helped catapult the controversy to the forefront of Japanese American cultural groups’ and foundations’ agendas--he himself was interned in one of these camps at the age of five. Eric L. Muller, Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at University of North Carolina School of Law, assisted with preparing the sale catalog for Rago, and declined to proceed with a lecture planned at the auction house after learning that the consignor had refused to transfer or donate the property to Japanese-American cultural institutions. “I did not feel that I could deliver a public lecture connected to the sale in good conscience,” Muller told the ArtsBeat blog of the New York Times of the ethical quandary he faced. As the social media campaign opposing the sale gained traction and an injunction was issued from one former internment camp site, the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, Rago announced their agreement to cancel the auction on April 15, 2015. The auction house’s decision and underlying motivations still draw criticism from activists such as Shirley Higuchi, chairwoman of the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation, who stresses that only after the immediate threat of legal action did Rago agree to withdraw the items from the auction block.