Chiura Obata: An American Modern

On May 25, 2020, the major retrospective of artist Chiura Obata (1885-1975), curated by Prof. Wang, closed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where the exhibit stayed on display in an empty museum since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By March of 2020, though, the Obata exhibit had been seen by more than 540,000 international visitors. 

Supported by a generous exhibition grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the two-and-a-half-year tour of this retrospective began at UC Santa Barbara's Art, Design and Architecture Museum (January 13 - April 29, 2018), the organizing museum. At its second venue, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (May 25 - September 2, 2018), it was viewed by more than 25,000 visitors, making it the museum's summer blockbuster in a decade. It next traveled to the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art in Japan (January 18 - March 10, 2019), a "homecoming" of sorts, for Obata was born in Okayama, but grew up in Sendai and studied in Tokyo, before emigrating to the U.S. in 1903. It was the first-ever retrospective in Japan that surveyed Obata's seven-decade career in the U.S. The exhibition returned to California to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento (June 23 - September 29, 2019). Its fifth and final stop was a six-month display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 27, 2019 - May 25, 2020).

The exhibition has received positive press coverage. Click on the link to read related reports and reviews, including those in The Washington Post and Hyperallergic.

 

The accompanying exhibition catalogue, Chiura Obata: An American Modern, is the first bilingual (English-Japanese) survey of Obata's body of work published by an academic press, the University of California Press. It includes many images that have never appeared in print, as well as Obata's original writings and a rare 1965 oral history interview that are reproduced in a book for the first time. The book is available at UC Press: https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520296541.