Yoshitoshi Tonight

If you are in Seattle tonight, Cullom Gallery is open late for the First Thursday Gallery Walk.  The exhibit Yoshitoshi Monogatari: Tales of a Grand Past & Uncertain Future is up through January 15th. 

The word and concept of monogatari in Japanese literature is fairly commonplace, though it's not a word tossed around much in the West.  Some may be familiar with it as part of the title of the famous and original novel, Genji Monogatari, or The Tales of Genji, written by the great Heian Period poet and novelist, Lady Murasaki (c. 973–c. 1014 or 1025).  A monogatari is basically a literary form for fictionalized versions of epic Japanese stories.  My use in the title for this show, I hope, serves to frame the historical and mythical woodblock prints of Japan's last great ukiyo-e artist, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), as the artist's own artistic spin on the legends and tales of Japan's grand past, which as a body of work produced at it's particular time, also served as a cultural tether for a nation embroiled in the upheaval of the rapidly changing and culturally unsettling Meiji Period (1868-1912).



Lunacy, from One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, 1889

Yoshitoshi's short life of fifty-three years coincided with five decades of the most dramatic and raid cultural change theretofore experienced by Japan and its people.  A young man in the waning years of the Edo Period (1615-1868) Yoshitoshi witnessed the fall of his government's self-enforced period of isolation, and by all accounts, anxiously considered the flood of Western invention, ideas, and institutions that made quick inroads into Japanese society with the transfer of power from the dynastic Tokugawa Shogunate to the pro-west Emperor Meiji.  For Yoshitoshi this official drive to modernize and westernize threatened the very fiber of his nation's identity.  He responded with ukiyo-e designs that on the surface recount ancient folktales, heroic legends, and epic battles, but on a deeper level, are a cultural touchstone for a nation, he felt, in danger of forgetting its past. 

Ushiwaka (Yoshitsune) and Benkei duelling on Gojo Bridge, 1881

Okubo Tadanori rescuing Tokugawa Ieyasu on the battlefield, from Twenty-four accomplishments in Imperial Japan, 1881

Chang Fei on Chohan Bridge glares back at the multitude of soldiers, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1885

I also wonder, though I have not teased out proof it it, if the  historic themes in the prints of the later part of his life also contain Yoshitoshi's own veiled commentary on the political events of the Meiji Period, rife with its own power struggles and insurrections.  For me, considered en masse, Yoshitoshi's historic ukiyo-e read like a visual monogatari, telling a Meiji-era rendition of Japan's ancient beginnings.  This exhibit includes 19 single sheet prints, diptychs, and triptychs from some of the artist's best-known series, including Yoshitoshi's Courageous Warriors, New Selections of Eastern Brocade Pictures, Mirror of Famous Commanders of Great Japan, Twenty-Four Accomplishments in Imperial Japan, New Forms of Thirty-six Ghosts.  I hope to see many of you here.

Year End Wrap Up 2010

I have been hibernating this week between Christmas and the New Year, spending time reviewing the business end of the past year, and thinking about goals for the coming 12 months.  There were a number of gallery highlights for 2010, one of the biggest being the successful move and reopening in our larger, ground floor location in Japantown.  I am humbled by the history and peaceful beauty of my new home.  The 100-year old fir floors, the old steam pipes that pop and groan, the sound of the piano through my shared wall with the Panama Hotel Teahouse, and my many new neighbors (some of whom I am getting to know by name and others only by sight and a wave while passing by the window),  all of it feels very right.  I cross my fingers and think of the hard work still ahead that is required to ensure that I remain a part of Nihonmachi going forward into the next decade.  

I am also proud of the strong exhibit schedule we offered through the summer and fall.  The gallery's second exhibit of Ryohei Tanaka's awesome papercuts was followed by our second show of German moku hanga artist, Eva Pietzcker's atmospheric landscape prints, and Annie Bissett's suite of Japanese woodblock prints of the American Pilgrims was also the gallery's second exhibit of the work of this rising talent.  Right now, though January 15, 2011, we have on view a great group of prints by Japan's last great ukiyo-e artist, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892).  As the economy improves, I hope to increase our exhibits of ukiyo-e and 20th century hanga, which still remain a vital interest of mine, not only for their fascinating beauty, but also as links to the work of artists working in Japanese print & paper media today.  In the coming months we will also be introducing through exhibits and adding to the gallery's growing stable, the work of several new artists whose work encompasses drawing, painting, paper cutting, collage, and Japanese woodblock printmaking. 

My deep thanks to all of you for your support this year.  I have felt it in many and very real ways over these months.  I hope that Cullom Gallery can hold your interest in the coming year as we continue to refine and stretch the edges of the Gallery's focus.  

With my best wishes for your Year of the Rabbit,

Beth Cullom

Cullom Gallery

Snow Day - Gallery Closed

I am sorry to anyone who braved the icy sidewalks downtown to visit the gallery today.  I am home with Julia whose school was closed for the day, along with all Seattle Public Schools and most neighboring districts due to snow and ice.  I am planning to be open tomorrow from 12 noon to 5 pm.  See the complete list of holiday hours below.

If you are in Seattle, have a happy safe day in the snow!

Weather & Holiday Closure Days
TUES 11/23, Closed due to local weather conditions
WED 11/24, Open 12 noon to 5 pm
THURS 11/25 & FRI 11/26, Closed. Happy Thanksgiving!
SAT 11/27, Open 12 noon to 5 pm.  Last day to see We Are Pilgrims!

Last Week for We Are Pilgrims

There are just three more days left to see Annie Bissett's woodblock print series, We Are Pilgrims.  Stop by Cullom Gallery (603 S Main Street, Seattle map) next Tuesday or Wednesday, Nov. 23 & 24, or the show's final day, Saturday, Nov. 27, and see this strong suite of Japanese woodblock prints that dig much, much deeper than the grade school myths of black hats and buckle shoes.  Bissett's series explores the real hopes, anxieties, mistakes, irrevocable impact, and real life personages of the American Pilgrims from many different angles.

John Alden, 1621 & Priscilla Mullins, 1621.

Annie recently shared with me a lay-sermon she delivered earlier this year at her own Congregational Church, an old Pilgrim church, close to her home in Northampton.  Here is a passage that I think gets at some of her kernel thoughts. (bold is mine, not Annie's).

They Looked Behind.

 for two years I studied everything I could find about the first Europeans who settled here in New England, especially in those first 50 years, when nothing was certain. I read about them, I thought about them, I tried to imagine this land as they encountered it, and I made these 15 woodblock prints about the stories that most intrigued me.  I discovered many surprising things in my research. Did you know that of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, only 37 were members of the separatist congregation coming from Holland? They called themselves not "Pilgrims," but "Saints" and they called the other 65 "Strangers." Did you know that the first brick building on the Harvard campus was a school for native American students? Or that the first Bible printed in North America was an Algonquin Indian translation? Or that two homosexual men were tried in court in Plymouth colony way back in 1637? Some of the stories amazed me, but what was even more amazing to me was that many of the things we're grappling with today were there right at the beginning: the role of religion in government, the question of who belongs in society and who doesn't, the role and rules of family life and marriage, and always a spirit of seeking, a pilgrimage to find home.

Honey, I'm Worried About the Kids.

 

Caleb & Joel Wend to Harvard.

As a child of the Pacific Northwest, the story of the Mayflower was a distant, self-contained, and contrived tale that resonated little with me. It was covered as a requisite part of third grade then pushed to the back of my mind with the rest of the lore of early America.  The complicated, rich, proud, and later tragic history of Northwest coastal and Great Northern Plains tribes, their great pre-contact societies, and their violent snuffing-out at the hands of European Americans, this was the real, dirty story or my ancestors' interaction with the native people of North America.  Growing up in Puyallup, WA, I also witnessed the abject poverty and the effects of ghetto/reservation life on the original Puyallup people.  In my mind it was arrogant at best and worse, dangerously retro-revisionist to accept the notion of shivering Pilgrims taken into the warm embrace of the wise Indian, never mind what we Europeans did to them once we got our strength back.  That is all to say that through my own engagement with Bissett's prints and her words of discovery, I have made a slow but profound turn-around in my understanding of the relevance the Pilgrims' experience as an American creation story, a story that we are it seems inexorably tied to.  As Annie points out the same hopes, tragic misunderstandings, and steadfast (some would say intractable) beliefs first manifested by the Pilgrims are the same issues we wrestle with today.  Sometime this summer Annie mentioned that Nathaniel Philbrick's book, Mayflower: a Story of Courage Community and War, had been a valuable resource for her while researching her series.  I wish I had started this book earlier, but finally did only this week.  Here is a passage from the preface: The Two Voyages.

Vast Unpeopled Lands.

...the Pilgrims (I thought) were the stuff of holiday parades and bad Victorian poetry.  Nothing could be more removed from the ambiguities of modern-day America, I thought, than the Pilgrims and the Mayflower.

But, as I have since discovered, the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving.  When we look to how the Pilgrims and their children maintained more than fifty years of peace with the Wampanoags and how that peace suddenly erupted into one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil, the history of Plymouth Colony becomes something altogether new, rich, troubling, and complex.  Instead of the story we already know, it becomes the story we need to know.

I certainly needed to know.  I see now that I must spend some time engaged with this story of the origin of our country, and I am guessing that it's especially those magical 50 years -- before the fighting and division tore our country apart for the first time -- that have a lot to teach us about how to be American today. 

 

Help stop a bad idea

In a rare departure from things art and Japanese, I have to use this forum to urge you to tell Washington State's Building Code Council to reject an amendment up for a vote in just 2 days, November 19th, that would delay implementation of a piece of previously-approved legislation requiring carbon monoxide detectors in residential buildings in Washington State.  My cousin, Lauren Johnson, was killed by CO poisoning in January 2009, so this is personal for me.  But beyond my own family's grief, it's important to note that unintentional exposure to carbon monoxide is the most common type of accidental poisoning in the United States, with 40,000 emergency department visits made each year because of the effects of the colorless, odorless gas. Here's the letter I wrote to the council:

Dear Washington State Building Code Council,

I urge each of you to please do the right thing on November 19th and reject the proposal before you that would amend legislation already in place requiring installation of carbon monoxide alarms in residential facilities in Washington State.  My cousin, Lauren Johnson, was killed by carbon monoxide while reading in her apartment in January of 2009.  Her rented apartment did not contain a $30 CO detector, a device which would have plain and simply saved her most amazing life.  Property owners don't get to delay doing this simple, morally right thing, just because they think it's a pain, or they don't want to take on the cost of detectors.  I can tell you it is a really REALLY BIG  pain to have someone you love killed in such a stupid, preventable way.  (It is also a pretty big pain for property owners to deal with the legal fallout of such egregious negligence toward their tenants or new property owners.)  Don't bend for property owners on this one.  Make them do the right thing and save lives.  It has already been debated and passed into law.  So its time for everyone to follow the law, not sometime in the future, but now.

I am letting all my Facebook friends and all my Twitter followers know that this is in your laps.  So you'll probably be hearing from a few of them too.

Sincerely,

Beth Cullom

Here is the email list to mail to:
jcochran@speakeasy.net, kristynatghe@yahoo.com, rallshouse@shorelinewa.gov, drbault@charter.net, jchelminiak@comcast.net, david.dewitte@pacificwoodtech.com, mhamasaki@hces-llc.com, a.homola@co.island.wa.us, rkoch@co.franklin.wa.us, DKokot@spokanecity.org, mkulaas@wenatcheewa.gov, mj_mueller@rezmail.com, peden@coffman.com, tpeng2009@yahoo.com, dale@seattlepipetrades.org, fulr235@lni.wa.gov, ormsby.timm@leg.wa.gov, tom.rodney@leg.wa.gov


If you'd like anymore information about Washington's CO legislation, or a full list of council members, please let me know.  Thanks for considering lending your voice to this important issue.
 

In the News - We Are Pilgrims

Thanks to Jen Graves at The Stranger for the shout out about Annie's Bissett's show.  The Curtis Erlinger photographs she also mentions are on view just down the street at Punch Gallery in the Tashiro Kaplan Building.  Stop by and have a look here and there, then have a cup of tea at the Panama Teahouse next door. Antidote for the wind and the rain.

Day off, Collaborating with Julia

Fall has hit Seattle hard this weekend!  Big winds and lots and lots of rain.  I spent today both inside and out with my daughter Julia, who turned five this month.  We spent the morning on a 'wind walk' picking up fall leaves, then stopped by Top Pot for a doughnut, and the grocery store for more apples for apple pie.  Tonight, we got busy on some watercolors to use for Julia's birthday thank you notes.  We started each doing our own thing, but it got more interesting when Julia asked if she could work on my painting (sure!) and then suggested that I do the same on hers.  Collaboration.  I've been thinking about this quite a bit.  Wishing for more at times at the gallery since I am virtually on my own there.  Thinking of its place in the story of the rise of modern Japanese prints.  And wondering what would happen if more moku hanga artists were to collaborate.  Some of these thoughts perking in preparation for my presentation at the 1st International Moku Hanga Conference, in Kyoto and Awaji next June.  I am delighted that a number of friends and colleagues will also be traveling to the conference and contributing their thoughts to the discussion, including the Drachen Foundation's Ali Fujino, and both of Cullom Gallery's own Annie Bissett and Eva Pietzcker!  Hard to think of the warm summer days of June on a day like this, but the months will tick by, I know.  (Apologies for the poor photos - taken with Photobooth on my Mac.)