The following is an archive of past Japanese Art Society of America lectures and special events. Click on JASA Programs for our most current schedule.
January • February • March • April • September • October • November • December
December
Wednesday, December 14, 6 p.m.
New York University, Institute of Fine Arts1 East 78th Street
New York, New York
Lecture and Holiday Party
Special guest speaker Matthi Forrer, Curator at the National Museum of Ethnology (Museum Volkenkunde) in Leiden, The Netherlands, and leading authority on ukiyo-e and early Dutch collectors of Japanese art, will speak on his latest publication, Surimono in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2011. Holiday reception following.
November
Saturday-Monday, November 19-21
Minneapolis Institute of Arts2400 Third Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints
Special trip for Edo Pop, featuring 120 of the most outstanding prints of the MIA collection. In addition, the exhibition will also feature the work of 10 contemporary artists who are inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and the concepts underlying the floating world, including a lecture by Timon Screech, SOAS, London. There will be a special behind the scenes viewing of the Gale Collection with Matthew Welch, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Japanese and Korean Art Department. Visits to private collections of Contemporary Japanese Ceramics. Organized by Marion Galison and other JASA Members.
October
Sunday, October 23, 6—8 p.m.
New York, New YorkOni Zazen Collection
Reception and viewing of a selection of modern art from The Oni Zazen Collection, organized with collection curator Laura Mueller. Exhibited works will include paintings by Ito Shinsui, Kaburagi Kiyokata, Kobayakawa Kiyoshi, and Takehisa Yumeji.
Thursday—Sunday, October 27—30
Portland and Eugene, OregonWeekend Trip to Portland/Eugene
Tour organized for JASA members to Portland and Eugene, Oregon, which includes the special exhibition The Artist’s Touch, The Craftman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum and lecture by John Carpenter. In conjunction are a tour of the famed Portland Japanese Gardens, a visit and lectures at the Schnitzer Museum, and private collection visits (Eugene). Organized by JASA members Maribeth Graybill, Curator of Asian Art, Portland Museum of Art; Lee Michels; and Anne Rose Kitagawa, Curator of Asian Art, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon.
September
Friday, September 16, 6 p.m.
New York University, Institute of Fine Arts1 East 78th Street
New York, New York
The Impact of Natural Disasters on Japanese Art
Gennifer Weisenfeld, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Art History, Duke University. Reception follows.
This talk will examine the varied Japanese visual responses to the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. Regularly rocking the Japanese isles, natural disasters from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to typhoons and tsunamis have inscribed themselves upon Japanese culture as people struggled to make sense of the resulting trauma. Yet paradoxically, as much as these calamitous events have brought physical devastation and psychological trauma, they have also created times of reflection and renewal. And radical social upheavals, whether from natural or man-made causes, have often produced tremendous surges of artistic foment, the physical marks of the catastrophe etched onto the land, cityscape, or the human body, inspiring a disturbing aesthetic or poetic resonance even as the event defies representation.
April 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2 p.m.
New York, New YorkA visit to the Burke Collection
Tour with Valerie Steele, Museum Director and Exhibition Curator
March
Sunday, March 20, 11 a.m.
Marymount School1026 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York
Annual Meeting
Annual Meeting and Featured Guest Speaker, Caron Smith, Consulting Curator, Crow Collection of Asian Art
Caron Smith will talk about surprises she encountered mounting the exhibition Black Current: Mexican Responses to Japanese Art, 17th–19th Centuries at the Crow Collection of Asian Art, in Dallas, Texas, where she is currently curator. Smith holds a Ph.D. from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts in Chinese art and archaeology and is a veteran museum curator, having also held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Rubin Museum of Art.
February
Wednesday, February 9, 6 p.m.
New York University, Institute of Fine Arts1 East 78th Street
New York, New York
Japanese Modern Art in the World: Global Modernism from a Local Perspective
Lecture by Alicia Volk, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland. Early 20th-century Japanese painting is among the most compelling produced anywhere in the world, yet the attention it deserves is long overdue. This lecture will introduce key monuments of Japanese modern art and place them in both domestic and international context. The focus will be on the oil painter Yorozu Tetsugorō, who devoted his career to resolving the sometimes uneasy relationship between native and foreign, and past and present, that was the defining challenge of Japanese modern art. Yorozu transposed the oppositional binary of East and West into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal, and in this way was at the forefront of a modernist movement that sought to redefine Japanese modern art and the role it should play in the world. This lecture will demonstrate how his paintings, while participating in the various discourses of European modernism, also expanded the scope of modernism’s possibilities and achievements.
January
Monday, January 10, 3–4 p.m.
The Museum at the Fashion Institute of TechnologySeventh Avenue and 27th Street, E Building
New York, New York
Japan Fashion Now
Tour with Valerie Steele, Museum Director and Exhibition Curator, This exhibition covers Japanese fashion from 1980 to the present, avant-garde looks associated with the first wave of Japanese design in the 1980s, but also a range of subcultural and youth-oriented styles, such as the Elegant Gothic Lolita style and the Cosplay phenomenon. In addition, Japanese fashion often has a strong component of realism and an obsessive interest in perfecting classic styles. Contemporary Japanese fashion is globally significant precisely because it mixes elements of realism, such as high-tech fabrics or creating a perfect pair of jeans, with both the avant-garde and pop cultural elements, especially those associated with electronic media, such as manga (comics), anime (animated cartoons) and video games.
Tuesday, January 18, 6 p.m.
New York University, Institute of Fine Arts1 East 78th Street
New York, New York
Kamigata-e: Osaka and Kyoto Prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Lecture by Sarah E. Thompson, Assistant Curator for Japanese Prints, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Among the findings of the Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP), carried out from 2005 to 2010 at the MFA, was a fine collection of Osaka and Kyoto prints. These Kamigata-e include at least 2,800 sheets, most of them apparently acquired in Japan by William Sturgis Bigelow in the 1880s (from a total collection of about 54,000 sheets, of which over 30,000 are from Bigelow). The talk will present highlights of the MFA collection of Kamigata-e, including both works that were included in the 2006 MFA exhibition “On Stage in Osaka” and additional works that were discovered subsequently.