Cleveland’s Cultural Gardens stretch nearly four miles along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard—a linear park where over thirty immigrant communities have built individual gardens celebrating their heritage. It began in 1916 and continues today, one of America’s most ambitious experiments in multicultural public space.

The Lithuanian Garden represents one thread in this larger tapestry. Lithuanian immigration to Cleveland surged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the garden stands as that community’s claim to permanent place in the city’s civic landscape. Not a heritage center tucked away somewhere, but a public garden along a major boulevard, visible to everyone who passes.

Masumi’s 81-inch-wide panorama captures the garden’s linear extent—the experience of walking through it rather than viewing it from a single point. The photo collage technique mirrors how we actually see such spaces: not in one frozen moment, but through accumulated glances as we move through the landscape.

For Masumi, a Japanese-American artist, documenting these immigrant heritage gardens carried particular resonance. European ethnic groups were celebrated through permanent civic gardens. Japanese Americans, during her parents’ generation, were imprisoned in concentration camps. The Cultural Gardens embody one version of the immigrant story—the version where communities are invited to claim space, to belong, to be commemorated. Her work on the internment camps documents what happened when that invitation was violently revoked.