January–December 2017
January • February • March • April • May • June • July • August • September • October • November • December
The following is an archive of past Japanese Art Society of America lectures and special events. Go to JASA Programs for our most current schedule.
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January
MONDAY, JANUARY 9, 5:30 P.M
Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
New York, New York
Gallery tour Of Simon Starling: At Twilight exhibition
Dr. Michael Chagnon, Curator of Exhibition Interpretation at the Japan Society, will give JASA members a private tour of the exhibition Simon Starling: At Twilight (on view through January 15). This new project by Turner Prize–winner Simon Starling reimagines the 1916 premiere staging of W. B. Yeats’ noh-inspired dance play, At the Hawk’s Well, revealing how Japan’s traditional masked theater form helped shape Western Modernism one hundred years ago.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 6 P.M.
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
Swept Away by the Great Wave: A Woman Whose Time Has Come
Katherine Govier will give a talk based on her novel The Printmaker’s Daughter. The legendary printmaker Hokusai is one of Japan’s best-known artists. However, the story of his daughter Oei, considered by many to be the “ghost brush” responsible for many of Hokusai’s brilliant late works, came to light for the first time in The Printmaker’s Daughter. Govier’s novel, published by HarperPerennial in the U.S., combines scholarly detective work and a daring narrative that shines fresh light on women and the art world of 19th-century Edo.
Govier has published ten novels, three short-story collections and two anthologies of travel writing. She has won the City of Toronto Book Award and the Marian Engel Award. Govier has been President of PEN Canada and Chair of the Writers‘ Trust and lives in Toronto, where she established and directs The Shoe Project, a writing workshop for refugee and immigrant writers, in which they write about the shoes that symbolize their journey to Canada.
After the talk, there will be a reception and a book signing. The English language edition as well as a few copies of the Japanese edition will be available for sale (cash or check only please).
February
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 6 P.M.
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
Flash of Light, Fog of War: Illumination and Innovation in Senso-e
Bradley M. Bailey will discuss senso-e, or “war pictures,” of the Russo- and Sino-Japanese Wars, which represent the twilight of large-scale commercial Japanese printmaking. While based on the centuries-old tradition of ukiyo-e, senso-e also showcase the sweeping changes and modernity of the Meiji era. This presentation, based loosely on the upcoming exhibition at the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, will examine the modern innovations of Japanese woodblock prints of the period, with special emphasis on technologies of war, such as shipbuilding, printing, and above all, light.
Dr. Bailey is Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Ackland Art Museum. A specialist in 19th-century Japanese art, he holds PhD and undergraduate degrees in the History of Art from Yale University. In addition, he has an MBA from the Yale School of Management, where he focused on the economics of art, museum and foundations. In addition to the “Flash of Light, Fog of War,” Dr. Bailey is redesigning and reinstalling the Ackland’s Asian galleries (opened December 2016) and is researching a show on metalwork of the Meiji and Taisho eras. In his (meager) spare time, he is translating the complete writings of the Japanese yoga painter Aoki Shigeru.
March
SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 11 A.M.
Japan Society Auditorium
333 East 47th Street
New York, New York
www.japansociety.org
Annual JASA meeting and lecture
The annual meeting of the Japanese Art Society of America will precede Amusements in a Samurai Mansion: Male Youths as Actors, Escorts or Outcasts in Early Edo Arts, a talk co-sponsored with the Japan Society, by John T. Carpenter, recently named the Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. From 1999 to 2009, Dr. Carpenter taught history of Japanese art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and served as Head of the London Office of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. He has also taught courses at the University of Heidelber, and, from 2009 to 2011 he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Cultural Resource Studies at the University of Tokyo. He has published widely on Japanese art, especially in the areas of calligraphy, painting and woodblock prints.
TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 6 P.M.
Bonhams AuctionsGallery 1
580 Madison Ave., between 56th and 57th Streets
New York, New York
Kuniyoshi, Kunisada: A Closer Look
Joan Wright, Bettina Burr Conservator for Flat Asian Works on Paper at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, will present her work with the Japanese print collection highlighting the brilliant special effects created by the artisan block carvers and printers who transformed Kuniyoshi and Kunisada’s designs into stunning works of art. Information about the colorants used for printing, comparison of impressions and detailed images of surface effects will be included.
With close to thirty years experience as a museum conservator specializing in works of art on paper, Joan Wright received her MA and Certificate in Conservation in Works of Art on paper from the SUNY Cooperstown/Buffalo Graduate Program in the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works in 1984. From 1998 on, as a member of the Asian Conservation Studio staff of the MFA, Joan has concentrated on Asian works on paper. She is responsible for the care of Indian and Islamic paintings, manuscripts, Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books. Joan also oversees the care of Japanese postcards and with Jacki Elgar, conserves Tibetan Thangkas.
April
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 6 P.M.
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
Re-Creating Ukiyo-e: The Art and Craft of Tachihara Inuki
This lecture will be led by Henry D. Smith II, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of East Asian Languages & Cultures, Columbia University. Tachihara Inuki (1951–2015) occupies a unique place in the history of the Japanese ukiyo-e print as an artist-craftsman who single-handedly assumed all the tasks traditionally distributed among the members of the “ukiyo-e quartet”: publisher, designer, woodblock carver and printer. Giving up a brief career as a jazz musician at the age of 25, he set out to master entirely on his own the skills needed to make prints, using as faithfully as possible the tools and materials of nineteenth-century artisans. Over a period of fourteen years from 1978, he produced 60-odd ukiyo-e “recreations””(saigen), striving to produce prints that would have the same visual and tactile impact that they would have had when freshly printed in Edo. From 1992, he turned away from ukiyo-e recreations to his own original sôsaku prints, using the same techniques. This work was diverse, including book illustrations, portraits of contemporary kabuki actors, and most memorably, a group of portraits of what he imagined three of the great ukiyo-e masters to have looked like. Tachihara died in the summer of 2015 shortly before a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Hagi Uragami Museum in Yamaguchi Prefecture, for which a handsome catalogue was prepared. For further information on this topic please consult Henry Smith’s article, “Re-creating Ukiyo-e: The Art and Craft of Tachihara Inuki,”in Impressions 38 (2017).
SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1–6 p.m.
Asia Society
725 Park Avenue at 70th Street
New York, New York
Visit to two collectors of contemporary Japanese Ceramics
We will be visiting the homes of Leslie and Alan Beller and Steven Korff and Marcia Van Wagner. Steve Korff’s collection was featured in an August 17, 2016, New York Times article, which noted “This simple house …keeps the more than 400 sculptural vases, bowls, sake cups and flasks that have quietly made him one of the leading collectors of contemporary Japanese ceramics.” Selections from the Bellers’ collection have appeared in museum exhibitions (such as the 2015 San Antonio Museum of Art show on Japanese contemporary ceramics). Gallerist Joan Mirviss will be present at the Bellers’ home to answer questions about their collection and, after the visits, the Bellers will kindly host a reception.
May
SATURDAY, MAY 13
Sackler Galleries
1050 Independence Ave. S.W.
Washington, DC
Excursion to Washington, D.C., for Utamaro
For the first time in nearly 140 years, three important paintings by Utamaro Kitagawa (1753-1806) are being exhibited together, at the Freer/Sackler Museum in Washington, D.C., from April 8 to July 9. This is the only location showing all three paintings together. Senior Curator of Japanese Art James Ulak, Ph.D., will lead JASA members through the exhibition. In addition, our group will attend a conversation at the Sackler Gallery on “Trading in Japonisme: The French Obsession with Japanese Art,” featuring curators Jim Ulak and Julie Nelson Davis, along with Gabe Weisberg, professor of art history at the University of Minnesota and a noted expert on Japonisme. The conversation will focus on the art collectors and dealers who drove the explosion of Japonisme in late nineteenth-century Paris.
MONDAY, MAY 15, 6 P.M.
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
The Art of Japanese Armor: A Shokunin’s (Craftsman’s) Perspective
Japanese armor is considered to be the apex of Japanese art because one suit can have components that employ all of the exalted Japanese arts. This talk by Andrew Mancabelli will examine Japanese armor as a work of art and explain the different attributes and processes by which Japanese armor is made and restored. In addition, the shokunin’s difficulties in the modern world and the problems with preservation, restoration, and display will be discussed.
Andrew Mancabelli holds advanced degrees in Archaeology and currently specializes in the preservation of traditional culture and Japanese antiquities’ identification and restoration. He is the only foreigner to have completed a traditional apprenticeship under a Japanese armorsmith and is one of only a handful of qualified Japanese armor restorers. He currently owns and operates a gallery in Japan where he focuses on restoration and advising museums, shrines, and temples in Japan and abroad. He has appeared on national television in Japan and is recognized as a traditional master craftsman
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June
THursDAY–Friday, june 15–16
San Antonio Museum of Art
San Antonio, TX
San Antonio exhibition tour
The highlight of our tour will be the exhibition Heaven and Hell: Salvation and Retribution in Pure Land Buddhism, (June 16– September 10) curated by Dr. Emily Sano, JASA board member and the Coates-Cowden-Brown Senior Advisor for Asian Art at the San Antonio Museum of Art. This is an opportunity to view how artistic expression of the Pure Land Faith has endured and been transformed through the centuries.
Participants are invited to a reception at the museum on Thursday, June 15, from 6 to 8 p.m. On Friday June 16, Dr. Sano will give us a private tour of the exhibition in the morning and in the afternoon, take us to storage to view some of the Zeshin lacquers from the Edson Collection and other Japanese objects not currently on view.
Also on Friday, June 16, from 6 to 7 p.m., we will attend a lecture by Professor Randall Nadeau, a scholar of Buddhism and East Asian cultures at Trinity University. Dr. Nadeau will discuss the cosmological system of Pure Land Buddhism, the Pure Land–Zen synthesis of Chinese Buddhism, and the development of Pure Land schools in late Tokugawa Japan.
THursDAY, june 22, 3 p.m.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY
MET exhibition tour
Members will tour Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection with Monika Bincsik, Assistant Curator in The Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Asian Art. On view at the Met from June 13, 2017, through February 4, 2018, this new exhibition features more than 80 works of Japanese bamboo art, dating from the late 19th century to the present, the period when basketry in Japan became recognized as an art form that transcends “craft.” The exhibition, including works by all six masters who have received the designation “Living National Treasure,” is drawn from the Abbey Collection, one of the finest private collections of Japanese baskets and bamboo sculpture.
Monika Bincsik specializes in Japanese decorative arts and textiles. Previously, she served as Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest, from 2002 to 2007 and as research assistant at the Art Research Center at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where she earned a second Ph.D. for a dissertation focusing on Japanese lacquers.
FriDAY, june 23, 11 A.m. –3 p.m.
New York, NY
Visit to Three Special Gallery Shows
JASA members will tour three Japanese Bamboo Basket exhibitions at noted galleries in New York City.
11–11:45 a.m.
Erik Thomsen Gallery
23 East 67th Street
For the first stop, the group will meet at Erik Thomsen Gallery for a tour of Masters of Bamboo Art, which will include 44 Japanese baskets. The exhibit will be on view June 14–September 1.
12:15–1 p.m.
Joan B. Mirviss, Ltd
39 East 78th Street
The second stop is a visit to the Tai Modern’s exhibition, Masterpieces of Japanese Bamboo Art, shown at the Joan Mirviss Gallery, which will be on view June 14–July 6.
BREAK FOR LUNCH (on your own)
Group 1: 2–2:30 P.M.; Group 2: 2:30–3 P.M.
Ippodo Gallery
12 East 86th Street, #507
For the third visit, our group will split into two, due to the limited space in the gallery, which can accommodate 8 to 10 people. Ippodo is featuring Bamboo Exposed: Mastery in Modernity of Hafu Matsumoto. This show will explore the lineage of Take-Kôgei bamboo from Rokansai and Shokansai Iizuka.
August
FRIDAY–Sunday, August 11–12
San Diego and Los Angeles
California
JASA Excursion to Southern California
JASA is hosting a special excursion for members to see a diverse array of Japanese art currently on exhibition. The program begins on Friday, August 11, in San Diego for a full day of activities in Balboa Park. We will start at the Mingei International Museum, which is exhibiting a fascinating selection of “Kanban,” traditional Japanese shop signs, which have been gathered from museums across the United States and Japan, as well as from the Mingei’s extensive collection. Chief Curator Christine Knoke will take us through the exhibition.
In the afternoon, we will visit the San Diego Museum of Art, where Associate Curator for Asian Art Diana Chau will take us through a small but interesting print show, Modern Japan: Prints from the Taisho Era (1912–1926) and Beyond, as well as the permanent collection of Japanese and Asian art. We’ll also see some special objects from storage, including a rare Edo-period handscroll.
On Saturday, August 12, we will travel to Los Angeles to see the magnificent collection of Japanese cloisonné objects donated by Donald Gerber and Sueann Sherry to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and currently on exhibition at the Pavilion for Japanese Art. Mr. Gerber will personally lead us through the exhibition and talk about his experience collecting some of the finest examples of cloisonné art in the world. Afterward, you are free to visit Japanese Painting: A Walk in Nature, which is also on display in the Pavilion.
September
Monday, September 11, 10 a.m.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10028
MET exhibition tour of Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection
We are pleased to invite members to join a second tour of the Japanese Bamboo Art: The Abbey Collection exhibition with Monika Bincsik, Assistant Curator. The exhibit will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from June 13, 2017 through Feb 4, 2018.
This popular exhibition, which was recently reviewed in The New York Times, features more than 80 works of Japanese bamboo art, dating from the late 19th century to the present, the period when basketry in Japan became recognized as an art form that transcends “craft.” The exhibition, including works by all six masters who have received the designation “Living National Treasure,” is drawn from the Abbey Collection, one of the finest private collections of Japanese baskets and bamboo sculpture.
Monika Bincsik, Assistant Curator in The Metropolitan Museum‘s Department of Asian Art, is one of the field‘s bright young stars, specializing in Japanese decorative arts and textiles. Previously, she served as Curator of Japanese Art at the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest from 2002 to 2007 and as research assistant at the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where she earned a second Ph.D. for a dissertation focusing on Japanese lacquers.
Monday, September 11, 5 p.m.
Scholten Japanese Art
145 West 58th St., Suite 6D
New York, NY 10019
Darkening Skies: The Tumultuous Times of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
Katherine Martin will host a special private viewing of the Scholten Japanese Art Gallery’s exhibition of prints by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892). There will be a gallery talk for JASA members on Monday, September 11 from 5-7 p.m. (with refreshments served after the talk). The gallery exhibition will display approximately 40 prints and will be on view from Thursday, September 7th through Friday, September 15th. The exhibition is a continuation of the gallery’s March 2017 single-artist exhibition on Yoshitoshi, one of the last great ukiyo-e artists of the 19th century. Drawing from a collection assembled over a period of nearly ten years (and recently published in a full-color catalogue illustrating 180 woodblock prints), the September show will focus on the dynamic and tumultuous times in which Yoshitoshi lived as reflected in some of his more violent imagery.
Tuesday, September 12, 5 p.m.
Bonhams, Gallery 4
580 Madison Aven.
New York, NY
From Beyond the Stars: Japanese Art-Crafts from Meiji to ShowA
JASA is pleased to offer members an additional Asia Week program next month. Noted Japanese art history scholar and former JASA Board member Joe Earle will present a lecture entitled From Beyond the Stars: Japanese Art-Crafts from Meiji to Showa. Joe Earle has worked for 40 years in the field of Asian and Japanese arts and cultures and has occupied senior curatorial roles at top museums in both the United Kingdom and the United States. He held leadership positions at Japan Society in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and previously was Keeper of the Far Eastern Department of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. He also has worked as a freelance consultant, carrying out Japanese art cataloging and exhibition projects for prominent collectors and dealers throughout the world. Currently he serves as Senior Consultant for Japanese art at Bonhams. Earle has authored, translated, edited or contributed to more than 20 major publications on Japanese art.
Thursday, September 14, 5:30–7 p.m.
Ronin Gallery
425 Madison Ave., 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10017
Private reception and artist talk with Katsutoshi Yuasa
Ronin Gallery is pleased to invite the members of JASA and the New York Print Club to a private reception and artist talk. Experience the works of some of Japan’s brightest talents in the second annual Contemporary Talents of Japan exhibition, featuring Katsutoshi Yuasa, the 2017 winner of the Ronin|Globus Artist-in-Residence Program. Katsutoshi Yuasa’s striking woodblock prints present a conversation between the contemporaneity of photography and the tradition of woodblock printmaking. Also on exhibition will be selected masterpieces of Hiroshige.
Tuesday, September 19, 6 p.m.
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Ave., between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
Langdon Warner: Impassioned Advocate of Japanese Art and Culture
Patricia J. Graham, Ph.D., will give a talk on Langdon Warner (1881-1955), a long-time curator of Asian art at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum and a World War II Monuments Man, who significantly helped shape and sustain the American public’s understanding of East Asia and especially of Japan, from the 1920s through the early postwar period. His introduction to the field began at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts under the tutelage of Okakura Kakuzō. Described by fellow Monuments Man George Stout in 1946 as “a pistol,” Warner’s visit to Japan warranted a full two-column laudatory editorial in the English language newspaper, Nippon Times. Warner is still fondly remembered in Japan as a savior of cultural treasures during World War II, and has been the subject of two recent Japanese documentaries on this subject. This talk is based on Pat Graham’s book-in-progress about Warner and Japan, and draws from numerous archival and published sources.
Dr. Graham is a former professor of Japanese art and culture, and former museum curator. She is currently an adjunct research associate at the University of Kansas Center for East Asian Studies and a consultant and certified Asian art appraiser based in Louisville, Colorado. Her interest in Langdon Warner began with her work at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where she catalogued over 900 Japanese art objects that Warner assembled for the museum in the early 1930s. Her many publications include Tea of the Sages: The Art of Sencha (1998), Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 (2007) and Japanese Design: Art, Aesthetics, and Culture (2014).
October
Saturday, October 7
Minneapolis Institute of Art
2400 Third Ave. South
Minneapolis, MN 55404
Talks on two exhibitions of contemporary Japanese art
10:30 A.M. | Pillsbury Auditorium
The exhibit Hard Bodies: Contemporary Japanese Lacquer Sculpture—30 works by 16 artist drawn from the Clark Collections at Mia, the only collection to feature this extraordinary new form—comprise the first-ever exhibition of contemporary Japanese lacquer sculpture. Andreas Marks, Ph.D., Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, Japanese and Korean Art Department Head, and Director of the Clark Center at Mia, will present Contemporary Japanese Lacquer Sculpture: A Short History. Since the Neolithic era, artisans in East Asia have coated bowls, cups, boxes, baskets and other utilitarian objects with a natural polymer distilled from the sap of the rhus verniciflua, known as the lacquer tree. In recent decades, a small but enterprising circle of lacquer artists have pushed the medium in entirely new directions by creating large-scale sculptures that superbly exploit lacquer’s lustrous beauty. Thirty works by 16 artists—drawn from the Clark Collections at Mia, the only collection to feature this extraordinary new form—comprise the first-ever exhibition of contemporary Japanese lacquer sculpture.
Noon | Villa Rosa Room
Seated luncheon.
1:30 PM | Pillsbury Auditorium
In the Lotus Pond: The Life and Art of Minol Araki will be presented by Aaron Rio, Ph.D., Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, in conjunction with the exhibit Boundless Peaks: Ink Paintings by Minol Araki, Renowned as an industrial designer, Minol Araki (1928–2010) was also a prolific painter. Born in China to Japanese parents, and active professionally in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei and New York, Araki created an immense body of ink paintings that reimagined tradition and straddled East and West. This exhibition is organized around five large-scale paintings depicting landscapes, dragons, snow monkeys and a lotus pond, complemented by works evincing such disparate influences as the Chinese painter Bada Shanren (c. 1626–1705), Lithuanian-American artist Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Araki‘s mentor Zhang Daqian (1899–1983) and medieval Japanese Zen painters.
Wednesday, October 11, 9:25 a.m.
Japanese Garden at Kykuit
200 Lake Road
Pocantico Hills, NY
Garden tour and tea ceremony
On this full-day excursion with Curator and JASA Board Member Cynthia Altman, JASA members will tour the teahouse designed by Yoshimura Junzo and take part in a tea ceremony. Urasenke Tea Master Yoshihiro Terazono will join us once again to demonstrate the details of this ancient tradition. JASA member Tomoko Urabe and Greg Succop will participate as tea-ceremony assistants. This will be followed by a bento lunch.
November
Wednesday, November 8, 6 p.m.
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Ave., between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
Ogata Kōrin and His Turn to Art
Frank Feltens, Ph.D., gives this talk on Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), one of Japan’s most cherished early modern artists. As was the case with many artists before and after him, history has turned Kōrin into a larger-than-life figure, a fact that has shrouded our understanding of the actual person behind his genius facade. Yet we are fortunate that Kōrin’s descendants preserved an unparalleled amount of documentation on Kōrin and his life. The wealth of letters and other records that survive allows us to uncover a very private side of the artist, one that unveils how illicit love affairs and inconsiderate spending gave rise to one of Japan’s greatest artists.
Dr. Feltens is Anne van Biema Fellow at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. He received his PhD in Japanese art history from Columbia University in 2016. His research focuses on late medieval and early modern Japanese painting. Recent publications include “Shinshutsu Sensōji zō Sakai Hōitsu shita-e Namu Butsuan honzon tenjiku butsuzōki ni tsuite” [”A Newly Discovered Handscroll at Sensōji with Underpaintings by Sakai Hōitsu”], Kokka 1440 (October 2015) and “Traversing Time: Three Centuries of Japanese Art at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin,” Orientations 46, No. 7 (October 2015). His article “Sartorial Identity: Early Modern Japanese Textile Patterns and the Afterlife of Ogata Kōrin” will appear in Ars Orientalis in October 2017. He is currently preparing a book manuscript on the life and art of Ogata Kōrin
November 17–19
New Orleans, Louisiana
Three-day visit to New Orleans
Join us for an autumn visit to the gracious city of New Orleans to see the special exhibition, New Forms, New Voices: Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection, at the New Orleans Museum of Art. There will be a reception and special lecture, Japanese Ceramics Tomorrow, by noted scholar Joe Earle on the evening of November 17. A private visit to the Gitter-Yelen Collection at the Gitters’ New Orleans home is planned. A complete itinerary to be sent next month.
Using examples from the Kurt and Alice Gitter collection as well as others by emerging artists, all of them made during the current century, Earle will show how contemporary Japanese ceramics have reached an interesting point of development. As the time-worn narratives of “innovation within tradition” and “Japaneseness versus Westernness” recede into insignificance, it becomes easier for us to look at these works from a more global perspective.
Joe Earle was Director of Japan Society Gallery in New York from 2007 to 2012 and previously held leadership positions in Asian art departments at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Now based in London, he works as Senior Consultant for Bonhams auction house in the U.K. and U.S. He has also revived his former career as a prolific author of Japanese art catalogues, with no fewer than six titles due to be published this year.
December
Monday, December 11, 6 p.m
The Marymount School
1026 Fifth Avenue, between 83rd and 84th Streets
New York, New York
JASA Holiday Party and Special Guest Lecture
Professor Samuel L. Leiter will speak on Kabuki at the Turning Point: 1952–1965. During the post-Occupation years of 1952–1965, kabuki’s future was in limbo. Tokyo’s three major kabuki theaters had been rebuilt, including the Kabuki-za, but the future remained uncertain in a rapidly changing postwar society, with competition from multiple forms of entertainment. Its senior actors were passing away, its company system was crumbling, promising actors were deserting to act in movies, its major producer was being raided by a rival, new plays were becoming rare, and the fate of men playing females was in doubt. At the same time, international tours were begun and an enormously popular star took kabuki’s most revered name. This talk describes the challenges kabuki faced before regaining its footing as Japan’s best-known theatrical form.
Professor Leiter is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Theater at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was a Fulbright research scholar to Japan and has received many other academic honors and awards, including being the first theater scholar to receive an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship. In 2017 he received Brooklyn College’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He was editor-in-chief of Asian Theatre Journal from 1992 to 2004 and has written or edited over two dozen books on Japanese theater, New York theater, famous stage directors and Shakespeare. His articles have appeared in numerous professional journals, and he has published essays in 18 books. His experiences also include having done the back-translations of three Broadway musicals for their Tokyo productions. From 2012 to 2014 he served as a nominator for New York’s Drama Desk Awards and is currently a Drama Desk voter. Over the past five years, he has reviewed over 1,000 New York shows on the blogs Theatre’s Leiter Side, Theater Pizzazz and the Broadway Blog.
Friday, December 15, 4 p.m.
Japan Society
333 East 47th St.
New York, NY
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise Exhibition Tour
A guided tour by Dr. Michael Chagnon, Curator of Exhibition Interpretation, of the special exhibition, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise, an exploration of cross-cultural interactions between Japan and the West in the 16th century (referring to the famous Tensho Embassy of 1582–90), including Important Cultural Properties from Japan and the world premiere of Sugimoto’s ”Gates of Paradise” series, on view in two rotations at Japan Society from October 20, 2017 to January 7, 2018.
Friday, December 15, 5:30 p.m.
Japan Society
333 East 47th St.
New York, NY
An Evening with Hiroshi Sugimoto
Artist Hiroshi Sugimoto will share his perspective on the exhibition, which explores an early, though largely forgotten, encounter between Japan and the West in the 16th century. The artist’s latest series, focusing on the Ghiberti Gates in Florence is a special highlight. Hiroshi Sugimoto will also introduce his latest architectural and theater projects.