Winter–Spring 2024

January • February • March • April • May • June
Japanese textile
Below is a listing of JASA-sponsored events, including webinars, in-person lectures and tours. If you like, you can print out this schedule using the print function of your browser. You may also refer to the Newsletter’s listing of JASA events. If you wish to receive reminders by E mail, please contact our Membership Coordinator.  For all regional events, we would appreciate advance notice of attendance. Please contact the Membership Coordinator.

June

Thursday, June 13, 5 p.m. EDT

Zoom webinar

Zoom webinar with Naomi Pollock, architect and journalist, who will discuss her new book The Japanese House since 1945. Registration details to come.

May

Friday–Monday, May 3–6

 Smart Museum of Art
Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL

Japanese Art in Chicago

JASA will travel to Chicago to view the exhibition Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan at the Smart Museum of Art with Chelsea Foxwell, co-curator of the exhibition and Associate Professor of Art History University of Chicago.  In conjunction with the exhibition, which will run from March 21 to June 9, co-curators Chelsea Foxwell and Bradley Bailey have organized a symposium at the University of Chicago, which will take place on Friday and Saturday and will include these speakers:

  • Bradley Bailey, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
  • Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago
  • Chelsea Foxwell, University of Chicago
  • Mami Hatayama, Roger L. Weston Foundation
  • Meghen Jones, Alfred University
  • Andreas Marks, Minneapolis Institute of Art
  • Alison Miller, University of the South
  • Rhiannon Paget, Ringling Museum of Art
  • Doshin Sato, Tokyo University of the Arts
  • Eriko Tomizawa-Kay, University of Michigan
  • Alice Tseng, Boston University
  • Takurō Tsunoda, Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Art

JASA’s group members will have private visits on Sunday and Monday including a tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Frederick C. Robie House, a visit to The Mann Collection of ukiyo-e, followed by lunch in Highland Park and a presentation on sosaku hanga by Elias Martin on Sunday. Monday begins with a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, with curator Janice Katz, lunch together, and a visit to the Weston Foundation.

A block of rooms have been secured at the Hotel Sophy, near the University of Chicago campus. Due to space limitations, this trip is limited to 25 people. The fee  is $650, which includes lunches, dinners, transportation to and from Highland Park, and transportation to the Art Institute of Chicago Monday morning. Participants are responsible for airfare, local transportation unless otherwise noted, and hotel.

Please register here by March 25. We encourage you to pay by Zelle or check to save JASA extra processing fees. Please email allisontolman@gmail.com with any questions.

Monday, May 13, 5 p.m. EDT
Live Zoom Webinar: Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo

This is the second JASA program this spring to focus on Utagawa Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Following the Zoom webinar featuring the Brooklyn Museum’s rare set that is currently on exhibition through August 4, 2024, noted curator and author, Dr. Andreas Marks, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and Director of the Clark Center at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will discuss his newly published book of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Definitive Collector’s Edition. Utagawa Hiroshige’s monumental landscape series, first published in the 1850s, is among the best-known and highly coveted group of Japanese prints. In this series, Hiroshige depicts 118 locations in and around Edo (today’s Tokyo) during the four seasons, often from hitherto obscure and unique perspectives. Hiroshige’s views were so popular that each design was reprinted many times. Some have reached iconic status.

For his new study, Dr. Marks reviewed 4,700 prints from the series. Drawn from 32 different museums and private collections, the book is the first to present all deluxe versions printed that incorporate special printing features, such as like color gradation. Dr. Marks reveals that no complete set of the deluxe versions is held in a single collection today. He shows how and where Hiroshige’s ideas for each view originated with reference images, and discusses Hiroshige’s designs through the many later printed versions. With 700 images, the book is a definitive guide to understanding the complexity of Hiroshige’s great work as well as the dynamics of the Japanese print market during this period.

Click here to register for the Zoom event: May 13 zoom webinar. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

April

Wednesday, April 3, 5 p.m. EDT
Live Zoom Webinar: Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo

On view from April 5 through August 4, Brooklyn Museum’s upcoming exhibition of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo will feature new versions of the original views by the iconic Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, with photographs by Ȧlex Bueno of some of the contemporary sites of Hiroshige’s designs. This panel discussion includes catalog author and historian Henry Smith, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University; Joan Cummins, Senior Curator, Asian Art, Brooklyn Museum and exhibition curator; and Ȧlex Bueno, Project Assistant and Professor, Centre for Global Education, Tokyo, who will discuss photographic images in the exhibition.

Click here to register for the Zoom event: April 3 zoom webinar. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

Thursday, April 18, 11:30 a.m. EDT

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY

Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo

In-person visit to the museum with Curator of Asian Art Joan Cummins to view exhibition Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (featuring Takashi Murakami), which runs April 5 through August 4. Registration details to come.

March

Wednesday, March 20, 5 p.m. EDT

Japan Society New York
333 East 47th St.
New York, NY

Annual JASA Meeting

As part of Asia Week 2024, JASA is presenting a special lecture, When Zen Becomes Political: Zen and Soft/Hard Power, by Frank Feltens, surator of Japanese Art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Zen has been used to foster political agendas, as inspiration for activism, and as a way to go against common norms. This talk highlights distinctive moments and individuals that made Zen and its arts a part of the political discourse of their times. They showcase how Zen has been part of Japan’s hard and soft power for centuries and continued to be in the twentieth century.

The lecture will also will be webcast live via Zoom. Registration in advance is required. Click here to attend the lecture in person. Click here to attend the lecture via Zoom.

Following the lecture, JASA will hold its annual meeting of members in the Japan Society auditorium. New and re-elected board members will be announced at the meeting along with other business matters. If you have not yet voted your proxy ballot, please do so here. Biographical information on the nominated board members is available here.

At 4 p.m., immediately preceding Dr. Feltens’ lecture, JASA members will have the special opportunity to tour Japan Society’s new exhibition, None Whatsoever: Zen Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection, led by the new gallery director, Michele Bambling. Registration is required by March 10. Please click here to register: 4pm Gallery tour. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

March 26,  5 p.m. EDT

Alison Bradley Projects
526 W. 26th St., Suite 814 
New York, NY 10001 

Please join us for a special tour of Un/ Weaving: Haji Oh with Curator Eimi Tagore-Erwin. The exhibition presents Oh’s twenty-year commitment to the concept of “post-memory,” in which the artist gives expression to the generational memories of transpacific migrants through a multimedia practice incorporating textile, sculpture, photography, audio, and projection. Oh’s research-based practice begins with key foundational works exploring her own family’s migration from Jeju Island in Korea to Japan, before expanding to other unexamined histories such as Japanese-Canadian women in WWII incarceration camps and labor movements of the Korean and Taiwanese diaspora across islands in the Pacific. She is also this year’s recipient of the prestigious Tokyo Contemporary Art Award (TCAA) and will be the subject of an upcoming two-person exhibition at Tokyo’s MOT as part of this honor.

There is no charge for this visit. Group size is limited to 15. Please register by March 19. To register, please click here: March 26 Tour. Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

February

Wednesday, February 7, 5 p.m. EST

Live Zoom Webinar

Surprises in the South: Japanese Art in Alabama

Did you know there is another JASA? The Japan-American Society of Alabama! This is only one aspect of under-known connections between Japan and the state of Alabama. Please join us for a live Zoom webinar with Dr. Katherine Anne Paul, Virginia and William Spencer III Curator of Asian Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Dr. Paul will discuss the many surprises and connections with Japanese Art in Alabama, including:

  • Mobile, Alabama, native, Mary McNeil Fenollosa—co-author of Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art: An Outline History of East Asiatic Design, with her husband, Ernest Fenollosa—left her collection to the Mobile History Museum.
  • In 1915, the town of Satsuma, Alabama, was named after the Japanese satsuma orange, which was successfully cultivated and grown there starting in 1878, a gift from Emperor Meiji.
  • Part of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, a Japanesque garden designed by Japanese-American architect  Masaji “Buffy” Murai showcases a Japanese tea house called Toshinan, designed and installed by Kazunori Tago (eighth generation Miyadaiku from Maebashi, Japan).
  • Of course, there is also the great work of Dr. Donald A. Wood at the Birmingham Museum of Art (Awardee of the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays) renowned for his Kamisaka Sekka: Rimpa Master—Pioneer of Modern Design exhibition and publication as well as his work with Echizen ceramics. Throughout his 30 year career Don Wood keenly acquired Japanese works for Birmingham’s collections. Many of these works, like  Kasuga Shika Mandala by Rokkaku Jakusai, have fascinating Alabama histories.

Webinar posted: View this February 7 lecture Surprises in the South: Japanese Art in Alabama, with Dr. Katherine Anne Paul.

Tuesday, February 27, 11 a.m. EST

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Ave
New York, NY
www.metmuseum.org 

Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art

Dr. Aaron Rio, the museum’s Associate Curator of Japanese Art, will lead us on a tour of on the third rotation of four in this year-long exhibition in the Japanese galleries. The exhibition begins with sacred images from early Japan that speak to concerns about death, dying, and the afterlife or that were created in response to other uncertainties, such as war and natural disaster. The presentation then proceeds chronologically, highlighting medieval Buddhist images of paradises and hells, Zen responses to life and death, depictions of war and pilgrimage, and the role of protective and hopeful images in everyday life. In the final galleries, the exhibition’s underlying themes are explored through a selection of modern woodblock prints, garments, and photographs. The exhibition is made possible by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation Fund.

January

Tuesday, January 9, 2024, 2 p.m. EST

Japan Society New York
333 East 47th Street
New York, NY

Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus

Dr. Midori Yoshimoto, Professor of Art History and Gallery Director, New Jersey City University, and Danielle Johnson, Researcher and Fluxus Scholar, previously Curatorial Assistant, MoMA, will lead a tour of Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus. This exhibition is the first to fully explore the essential role of Japanese women in Fluxus, a movement instigated in the 1960s that helped contemporary artists define new modes of artistic expression. Near the 60th anniversary of the movement’s founding, it highlights the contributions of four pioneering Japanese artists—Shigeko Kubota (1937-2015), Yoko Ono (b. 1932), Takako Saito (b. 1929), and Mieko Shiomi (b. 1938)—and contextualizes their role within Fluxus and the broader artistic movements of the 1960s and beyond.

Note: Sign up in advance is required, and the deadline is January 3. Group size is limited to 25 people, and guests are permitted. The fee is $20 per person. Click here to register and pay via check or PayPal. (If you would like to pay by Zelle, the JASA Zelle account is Japanese Art Society of America and the email is jasa@japaneseartsoc.org.)

Please contact Cheryl Gall, membership coordinator, at jasa@japaneseartsoc.org or (978) 600-8128 with any questions.

Wednesday, January 24, 5 p.m. EST

Live Zoom Webinar

Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art: An Exhibition Talk with Dr. Aaron Rio

In a time of uncertainty around the world, one singular exhibition has captured the essence of how art in Japan has marked times within its history that can offer the viewer new insights and powerful messages of hope and positive views. The show is Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art, curated by Dr. Aaron Rio, Associate Curator of Japanese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His  talk will focus on the third rotation of four in this year-long exhibition in the Japanese galleries of the museum, made possible by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation Fund.

The exhibition begins with sacred images from early Japan that speak to concerns about death, dying, and the afterlife or that were created in response to other uncertainties, such as war and natural disaster. The presentation then proceeds chronologically, highlighting medieval Buddhist images of paradises and hells, Zen responses to life and death, depictions of war and pilgrimage, and the role of protective and hopeful images in everyday life. In the final galleries, the exhibition’s underlying themes are explored through a selection of modern woodblock prints, garments and photographs.

Webinar posted: View this January 24 lecture Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art: An Exhibition Talk with Dr. Aaron Rio.

Past JASA programs