As a result of Executive Order 9066 signed on 19 February 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S. were forced from their homes and imprisoned in concentration camps. Stripped of their civil and political rights and confined in harsh landscapes, these new prisoners of the U.S. government quickly began creating art, broadly defined, that aided their efforts in re-territorializing the camps. Through this process of re-territorialization, imprisoned Japanese Americans altered shoddily built, crowded, and barren inside living areas into spaces of survival.