Spring 2018 exhibitions:
April 19-May 17, 2018
“Defining Class Through Fashion: The Costume Prints of Wenceslaus Hollar”
Curated by Kelsey Rozema
“Defining Class Through Fashion: The Costume Prints of Wenceslaus Hollar”, focuses on the artist’s “Aula Veneris” series, which was first published in London in 1644. In this series, Hollar was able to show in exquisite detail the varied fashions of women named only by their class and European nationalities. The exhibition will explore how seventeenth-century costume prints were able to categorize European women for global consumers.
“Fluid Lines: Tracing Ryakuga-Shiki in Japan and France”
Curated by Selena Erdman
Ryakuga-shiki, or ‘abbreviated pictures style’ woodblock prints, originally gained great popularity in Japan around the late 1700s, perhaps most significantly in the form of drawing manuals. These images were part of the tradition of ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’), which Western audiences eagerly consumed as they began to be exported.
The ryakuga-shiki manuals of Keisai Masayoshi (1764-1824) featured in this exhibition are a relatively unstudied and rarely exhibited facet of Japanese print culture. They are featured here alongside works by French printmakers Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Henri-Gabriel Ibels, in which the influence of ryakuga-shiki is highly evident. Fluid Lines explores not only the stylistic and thematic similarities between Keisai’s works and those of the French artists, but also provides insight into the issues of cultural appropriation at play in French japonisme.
