Lecture Videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x071jPQH4Ag Celebrating JASA’s 50th Anniversary, this lecture was presented on November 8, 2023, and features three curators who offer their perspectives on Meiji art and culture. The art of the Meiji era (1868–1912) was the first to be consciously collected as “contemporary Japanese art” in the United States. In this event, Takurō Tsunoda (curator at the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History), in conversation with…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPEne53dY9c This special JASA live webinar presented on September 11, 2023, and focuses on The Montgomery Collection, widely regarded as the largest and finest collection of mingei (Japanese folk art) outside of Japan. Luigi Zeni, guest curator for the Dallas-based Crow Museum of Asian Art, will discuss the collection with Swiss collector Jeffrey Montgomery, who has spent over 40 years acquiring approximately 1,100 works of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zOYmjcPSww In this May 9, 2023, presentation, Princeton University Professor Thomas Hare speaks about the origins of noh theater in Japan and, in particular, about its material culture. Noh drama has a 700-year history of continuous performances, and it has, in that time, developed a detailed body of conventions of performance that specify not only text, music and dance, but also the material culture of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6zTTAMQ4sw This lecture from March 19, 2023, features Felice Fischer, curator emerita, and her successor Xiaojin Wu, Luther W. Brady Curator of Japanese Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in conversation about highlights of the museum’s Japanese collections. They each present five significant art works from the PMA collection and preview a “wish list” item in their discussion. View more lecture recordings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uRaxzbFbJw In our February 7, 2023 Webinar, scholar Ramona Handel-Bajema, author of Art Across Borders: Japanese Artists in the United States before World War II (MerwinAsia Publishers, 2021), discussed the wave of Japanese artists who contributed to the establishment of American Modernism, challenged notions of a Japanese aesthetic and flourished in a nation that was at times hostile and other times welcoming. In her book, Dr. Handel-Bajema…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO1yxndxZ5s In this January 18, 2023, JASA lecture, Einor K. Cervone, PhD, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Denver Art Museum, reexamines narratives of lacquer development in the East Asian region, as explored in the exhibition The Five Directions: Lacquer through East Asia, which opened December 18, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). What was it about lacquer that made it…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2zeWg4k-0g Our final program of 2022, on December 5, featured Natsu Oyobe, Ph.D., curator of Asian Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Specializing in modern and contemporary Japanese art, Dr. Oyobe has curated numerous Japanese art exhibitions, including Wrapped in Silk and Gold: A Family Legacy of 20th-Century Japanese Kimono (2010), Mari Katayama (2019), and Clay as Soft Power: Shigaraki Ware in Postwar America and Japan (2022). She is also…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezZHh3JuDuA This November 8, 2022, talk by Alison J. Miller, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennesee), provides an introduction to the woodblock prints of the 1870s and 1880s with a focus on how the images worked to create and reinforce social conceptions of Meiji values and ideals. During the early Meiji period…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAoo84xkIgc In this September 29, 2022, lecture, Maggie Mustard, PhD, presented a history of postwar Japanese photography from 1945 to 1980, focusing on the major themes and practitioners at the heart of the media’s development following the end of the Second World War. Dr. Mustard introduced the central questions that photographers were asking in the immediate postwar moment—what does “realism” mean for a photograph? Should…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtPR0nRY8gY For those members who could not participate in our June 28, 2022, in-person tour of the exhibition Kimono Style: The John C. Weber Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on August 24, we offered this Zoom webinar with Monika Bincsik, Diane and Arthur Abbey Associate Curator for Japanese Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Dr. Bincsik shared her curatorial…