A series of drawings by Migron, an inmate at Mazas and then Saint-Joseph Prison in France, tells the story of a man who murders his wife’s lover in the style of a comic strip. Its simple forms and rich colors have an unlikely resonance with diaristic ledger drawings by Howling Wolf, Bear’s Heart and Etadleuh Doanmoe, whose works offer glimpses of their Native American nations’ exploits and struggles against the United States government. The three were among the 72 Southern Plains leaders imprisoned at Fort Marion after the late-19th-century Red River War, but two of them were first sent to Fort Sill — which, as the wall text notes, became a Japanese-American internment site nearly seven decades later.

In a pair of charcoal drawings, Miné Okubo expresses the pain of internment by rendering stone-faced figures in thick strokes with their arms raised. The pose reminded me of photographs of the Holocaust — which is represented in a group of works nearby. Most haunting are two nightmarish sketches of skeletons playing the clarinet — studies for the painting “Death Triumphant” (1944) — made by Felix Nussbaum not long before he was killed at Auschwitz.

“The Pencil Is a Key” runs chronologically, but one of its strengths (helped by the fact that the Drawing Center’s main galleries comprise only two rooms) is that you can trace different paths and connections through it. A small, devastating collection of handmade greeting cards from gulag camps — one for Easter depicts a baby chick breaking free of its shell, with a chain around its neck — prefigures the envelope art of today: Both seem made to be sent to loved ones, and both repurpose generic imagery for personal expression.