Year: 2025

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JkphqBlmus On December 10, 2025, Dr. Jeannie Kenmotsu, Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Asian Art at the Portland Art Museum, explored the career of groundbreaking 20th-century painter and printmaker Yoshida Chizuko (née Inoue, 1924–2017), a pioneering woman modernist in Japan. As a young painter, Yoshida Chizuko made remarkable inroads in the male-dominated, often conservative, art establishment of mid-century Japan, securing coveted prizes and invitations…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDAIKYGjVf0 On November 11, 2025, Dr. Andreas Marks, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, provided an overview of Japanese illustrated books in premodern times. Storytelling has always played an important role in Japanese visual arts. Over a thousand years ago, painted hand scrolls began to appear in Japan that enhanced text with pictures. This tradition of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=236m0JM9f64 In this October 6, 2025, Zoom Webinar, Dr. Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, Research Director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Art and Culture at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, speaks on manga, a Japanese visual narrative art form that has evolved over the past century into a global phenomenon. Once referring primarily to comics and graphic novels, manga now encompasses…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsADQMdVxcY Recorded July 29, 2025, this online introduction to the British Museum’s exhibition Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road, which was on view until September 7, 2025, includes not only an overview by the lead curator, Alfred Haft, but also a chance to hear from one of its featured lenders, U.S. collector Alan Medaugh, about his long-standing passion for Hiroshige prints. View more lecture recordings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQvL47lC08 On June 9, 2025, Alicia Volk, Professor of Japanese Art at the University of Maryland, discussed her new book, In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan. This publication unearths an immensely creative yet almost entirely overlooked body of Japanese art. Introducing captivating but little-known paintings, prints, and sculpture made during the US occupation (1945–1952), her talk shows how the forgotten art of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6wUvfuEcaw On May 20, 2025, John T. Carpenter, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave an overview of the themes covered in the recently published book The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting, co-authored with Tim T. Zhang, research associate in the Department of Asian Art. This volume and the exhibition it accompanies—co-curated with Mr. Zhang and…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if5bomVbF3A The Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum has a fine collection of Japanese art, and on April 21, 2025, Fiona Collins-Rosedahl, Assistant Curator of Asian Art, discussed the museum’s print exhibition Pictures of a Changing Japan: The Evolution of Shin Hanga (on view until June 29). Shin hanga, or “new prints,” emerged during a period of dramatic sociopolitical change in Japan as a nostalgic revival of…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcxA4O_QqLs Dr. Matthew McKelway, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Art History and Archeology at Columbia University giving a talk on “Birds, Diplomacy and Painting in 16th-Century Japan.” View more lecture recordings