The relocation and detention of more than 100,000 Japanese-American citizens and Japanese aliens after the attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the plainest injustices in modern American history — but it was a crime for which we have been trying to atone. Gerald R. Ford, in 1976, formally apologized for the unwarranted internment of civilians in camps across the American West. Congress issued an apology as well, and in 1988 Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which awarded reparations to Japanese-Americans sent to the camps.

Donald J. Trump, our incoming president, has not followed his predecessors from both parties by acknowledging that locking up American citizens on the basis of ancestry was unacceptable. Asked in December 2015 whether he would have supported the internment of Japanese-Americans, he responded: “I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.” In November, a prominent supporter cited Japanese internment as a “precedent” for Mr. Trump’s proposals to register Muslim-Americans and ban Muslim immigration.

Amid concerns of history repeating itself, an illuminating and dispiritingly relevant exhibition is revisiting that era, seen through the eyes of Isamu Noguchi, one of this country’s best-known Japanese-American artists, who spent time in an Arizona relocation center. The legacy of his strange, voluntary detention is the focus of “Self-Interned, 1942,” at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, which reframes Noguchi’s placid, biomorphic sculpture, some made during his detention and other works from decades later, with letters and documents detailing his failed efforts to humanize the camps.

Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the winter of 1942, sanctioned the military to round up Japanese-Americans in California, Oregon and Washington State, and to deport them inland. Noguchi, then 37 and living in New York, was therefore exempt. He went anyway. The artist had already made a name for himself with large-scale works like “News,” a social-realist frieze for 50 Rockefeller Plaza, but the attack on Pearl Harbor had made him, as he writes in his autobiography, “not just American but Nisei” (a second-generation Japanese immigrant). He thought — quixotically, perhaps desperately — that by opting for internment he could improve the lot of Japanese-Americans and demonstrate their commitment to the American war effort.