A rare early work, Room Divider Sample #2 was created a few years after Sekimachi and her family were released from a Japanese internment camp, where they were incarcerated for two years during World War II. It is also one of the artist’s earliest weavings. While taking classes in silk screen painting and watercolor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Sekimachi chanced upon a group of students working with a loom. She promptly purchased her own loom and began to apprentice with Dorothy Ahrens at McKinley Adult School in Berkeley. Room Divider Sample #2 represents Sekimachi’s early practice, when she was using the loom to create modestly sized woven textiles whose titles suggest a utilitarian purpose but which ultimately function as independent works of art. Here Sekimachi explores the inherent abstraction of woven textiles, deftly manipulating the warp (vertical thread) and weft (horizontal thread) to create a complex, sophisticated composition in which variations in the thickness and texture of the woven materials, as well as shifts in the direction of the warp and the relative looseness or tightness of the interlacing, result in delicate, subtle patterns. Tufts of cotton project up from the piece, while loose threads hang downwards, creating the impression of a drawn sketch or painted study.