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The flight to Japan from art world centers like New York, London, and Paris isn’t exactly short. Those that do make the trip this year, however, won’t be disappointed with the art offerings, which span modern to contemporary. This week, during the Tokyo Gendai fair, the shows to see in the city are dominated by strong sculpture.

First up on the itinerary: the Artizon Museum’s exhibition of Constantin Brancusi, the first proper survey of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work in Japan.

Brancusi’s The Kiss has it all: it’s cute, it’s romantic, it’s profoundly Instagrammable. Made at the turn of the twentieth century, it also happens to mark the starting line of modern sculpture: from The Kiss’s economy of means, the rest was a sprint, from Picasso to Moore to Giacometti all the way up through Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread. So it’s no surprise that the Kiss is situated front and center at the Artizon show.

The exhibition neatly charts Brancusi’s wiggling free of Rodin’s influence and taking flight: the show culminates in a section dedicated to the form of the bird, represented by the rightly famous Bird in Space, an elegant skyward swipe of bronze. There are also photographs, and a section dedicated to recreating Brancusi’s Montparnasse studio. Purists will gripe about the large number of posthumous casts but, for a lay audience, the show serves as a decent dose of beauty and a fine introduction to a titan of modern sculpture.

If Brancusi conceived of the bird, Alexander Calder taught it to fly. Over at the Azabudai Hills Gallery is a compact survey of the master of the mobile—done in collaboration with Pace Gallery , whose huge new space is upstairs—assembled by the artist’s tireless grandson Sandy Rower, head of the Calder Foundation. The title? “Calder: A Japanese Effect” Why not. We’ve already had Calder paired with artists from Giacometti to Miro to Fischli and Weiss. As Rower has shown us over the past two decades, Calder is indeed the gift that keeps on giving.

There are some real gems in this exhibition, including an unexpected series of drawings of animals in motion: there are no other words for these than just perfect, especially the cats, with their movements captured in just a few strokes of ink. A star of this particular show, though, is Japanese architect Stephanie Goto, who did the exhibition design. A black mobile set against a black ceiling? Unexpectedly brilliant. Other works are situated against a wall covered in large black sheets of paper, another effect that shouldn’t work but does.

You may think of Brancusi again when you visit “MOON,” an exhibition of Los Angeles-based British artist Thomas Houseago at BLUM , the gallery formerly known as Blum & Poe. Best known as a sculptor, Houseago has several pieces in the show that recall the Romanian master, one of them an abstract egg-like shape set on a rough-hewn wooden plinth, and the other an owl in his signature technique of drawing in plaster.

For my money, the owl is the best piece in this show, displayed silhouetted against a large window. Like Ann Craven’s paintings of birds, this piece seems to capture the essence of the animal. Houseago has recently branched out into paintings, and they are dramatic and rich with color, if somewhat less successful than the 3D work. A large painting of an owl, for instance, is accomplished, but seems only to highlight the less-is-more brilliance of the sculpture.

After seeing the work of those three male sculptors, you will have to put on a different hat to experience the work of Rei Naito. Think of Henry James’s famous dictum and “try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” Because if you are not paying attention in the various displays of Naito’s work throughout the enormous Tokyo National Museum, you are going to lose quite a bit.

Naito, who was born in Hiroshima in 1961 and represented Japan at the 1997 Venice Biennale, works in a minimalist tradition, but not in the sense of, say, Donald Judd. There is nothing heavy about her work. Instead, objects ranging from small to miniscule—pompoms, balloons, pebble-like blown glass bubbles, animal figurines, bones, little mirrors, a jar of water—are deployed in ways that demand meditation on the part of the viewer. In one long, narrow gallery of the museum, such things are arrayed against slate gray walls and under dimmed lights: the effect is of being inside the artist’s imagination. Along one wall is white fabric inside a glass display case, looking like a snowbank. What amazes about Saito’s work is just how close it gets to twee without ever stepping over that line.

In the 1980s, Naito said of a particular artwork of hers that she was attempting to “create a spiritual place of her own.” The same might be said for another Japanese artist of Naito’s generation who works in a very different mode. Mariko Mori became known in the nineties for photographs of herself posed in urban environments in Japan, dressed up as various stereotypes of a Japanese woman. But over the past two decades she has been working in a spiritual mode, right down to merging her art with her living quarters.

The project currently on view at SCAI The Bathhouse is complex, involving crystals and a spiritualistic painting, and is connected to Mori’s artwork Peace Crystal (2016-2024), which is currently on view outside a palazzo in Venice during this year’s Biennale. At SCAI, Mori appears in augmented reality (you need to make an appointment) as a priestess whose attire draws on both Japan’s history and on the kind of futuristic effects found in video games. Like Saito, Mori has crafted an entire immersive world, one you can only enter in person.

For Theaster Gates, too, as a wall text explains in the Chicago artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan, at the Mori Art Museum , making art is a spiritual enterprise. Gates prepared for the Mori show by working with potters in Tokoname, which he had first visited in 2004, and came up with the concept of “Afro-Mingei,” a reference to the word for Japanese folk art, a movement that was overshadowed by the introduction of Western art to Japan in the 19th century. (“[W]hat is key for me is the way in which Mingei honors makers native to a place and resists external impositions of cultural identity,” Gates explains in wall text in the show.)

The results are displayed in the final section of this survey of Gates’ work and they are by far the highlight. After an elaborate timeline that traces Gates’ links with Japan comes an enormous display case holding ceramics by Tokoname potter Koide Yoshihiro, who died in 2022, and an enormous wooden bar—stools and all—that fronts a set of shelves holding binbo tokkuri bottles (sake bottles) made in collaboration with Japanese potter Tani Q. There’s also a terrific soundtrack (Busta Rhymes was on when I visited) and a spinning disco ball in the shape of an iceberg.

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The University of Manitoba is decolonizing its art collection, replacing problematic paintings and sculptures with contemporary Indigenous art.

“The university is ultimately a colonial institution that is designed to serve white people … and that needs to change,” said C.W. Brooks-Ip, registrar and preparator of the University of Manitoba Art Collection.

“We have had artwork that is by a white settler that depicts Indigenous folks in not really an accurate way, in sort of the mythologized way, that in some ways glorifies the white settlers — or at least reinforces their white supremacy.”

So Brooks-Ip created the Indigenous Student Led Indigenous Art Purchase Program, a two-year pilot project that aims to change that. The group of Indigenous students meets with artists and curators, visits studios and recommends artwork to purchase.

The move comes amid a larger debate about what to do with art that reflects a colonial and imperialist history. 

A reminder of home and community

The committee has received $30,000 from the school’s Office of the Vice-President (Indigenous). It’s submitted 24 proposals for paintings, prints, physical pieces and an etching, by artists including Jackie Traverse, Christi Belcourt and Kent Monkman. The group hopes to acquire them over the summer, and show them as part of an exhibition at the School of Art Gallery in October before installing them throughout the campus.

Third-year student Jory Thomas, 20, says she jumped at the opportunity to get involved as the project’s committee co-ordinator.

She remembers how overwhelmed she felt starting her architecture degree at the university. At the time, she said, there wasn’t a lot of Indigenous art on campus.

“Seeing pieces like that reminds me of home. It reminds me of community and it creates that sense of familiarity that gets you comfortable with being here … and ready to learn,” said Thomas, who is Red River Métis.

“The university is sending a message to students [that] you are welcome here.”

 

Canadian museums confront treatment of Indigenous people

Museums have started to confront how Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is presented and some are getting access to federal funding for addressing residential schools.

Removed paintings

One painting removed from the university president’s office is a work by Lionel Stephenson, an artist living in Winnipeg between 1885 and 1892.

The painting shows Upper Fort Garry on one side of the river, with an Indigenous person sitting outside a teepee on the other shore.

“It’s kind of depicting a ‘We’re over here and they’re over there’ type situation,” Thomas said. “It’s not showing community and togetherness. It’s showing the separation between the river and the settlement.”

It shows “the threat of direct colonization,” Brooks-Ip said.

Another is a sculpture of a buffalo hunt by Thomas Holland, an American artist and polo player. It portrays an Indigenous hunter riding a horse and spearing a buffalo.

While the depiction may be historically accurate, it wasn’t created from an Indigenous perspective of cultural understanding, respect and gratitude for the animal’s sacrifice, said Thomas, whose clan animal is the buffalo.

Images like this perpetuate harmful stereotypes of angry, violent Indigenous people, fostering a hostile environment on campus, she said.

“Instead of this violent attacking of the bison, there might be a better option of a sculpture, where they’re preparing the bison that they’ve hunted, because we historically used all the parts of the bison,” she said.

A new piece

One of the new pieces is by Frederick Lyle Spence, also known as Thunder Bear, an Ojibway carver from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba. It’s a soapstone carving of a black silhouette of a goose, with a dream catcher in its body, called “Let your dreams fly, for they will bring you home.”

Spence carved it in March, and he said it’s been waiting for the right home ever since.

“If I’m not ready to let it go it, one of the things I’ve been told is that it’s meant to stay and absorb your love and your positive energy,” Spence said.

“And when it’s ready, it’ll go to its new home and then it’ll sit and give off that energy to whoever is around it.”

He said he felt humbled and honoured when the university asked to buy it, especially when he reflected on his own experience as a student at the University of Winnipeg,  which he said made him feel ashamed of his identity and his “Peguis” accent.

“I didn’t feel welcomed. I didn’t end up having a huge community or connection with the university, which is sad.”

What to do with colonial art?

For years, art institutions have deliberated on what to do with works that reflect a colonial history — should they be relegated to vaults or reframed with an Indigenous perspective and context as an educational opportunity?

There’s room for both approaches, said Riva Symko, head of collections and exhibitions at Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq, home to the world’s largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art.

“We do need to put things away to make space for other voices to be heard and seen. Sometimes we need to put things away because they’re traumatic, because they are harmful … especially to our Indigenous visitors and audiences,” she said. “And we don’t want to instil more trauma on our communities.”

However, she said, artworks can occasionally be reframed or retold from a different point of view, giving a new understanding of them.

In 2023, the Manitoba government said it would conduct a review to ensure all Indigenous-themed artwork displayed in ministers’ offices is created by Indigenous artists.

A provincial spokesperson said that review is now complete, and that all but one piece was confirmed to have been made by Indigenous artists. The remaining piece’s artist is unknown, and has been taken down until it can be identified.

Society is going through a paradigm shift, changing how we view our history and looking for new ways of dealing with our colonial past, Symko said. Art can spur conversation and dialogue, she said.

“The future will tell whether we burn them down, or whether we store them away and lock them in the vault, or whether we bring them out and use them for discussion.”

While Indigenous art is the focus right now, U Manitoba is currently auditing its entire collection and “keeping an eye out for things that might be problematic.”

If this pilot project can be extended or expanded, Brooks-Ip would also be interested in looking for art reflecting other racialized and queer communities.

 

How one university is dealing with art reflecting our colonial history

7 hours ago

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The University of Manitoba is decolonizing its art collection, replacing problematic paintings and sculptures with contemporary Indigenous art.

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Karen Pauls | CBC News | Posted: July 5, 2024 8:00 AM | Last Updated: 3 hours ago

And what should be done with works that reflect a colonial history?

The University of Manitoba is decolonizing its art collection, replacing problematic paintings and sculptures with contemporary Indigenous art.

“The university is ultimately a colonial institution that is designed to serve white people … and that needs to change,” said C.W. Brooks-Ip, registrar and preparator of the University of Manitoba Art Collection.

“We have had artwork that is by a white settler that depicts Indigenous folks in not really an accurate way, in sort of the mythologized way, that in some ways glorifies the white settlers — or at least reinforces their white supremacy.”

So Brooks-Ip created the Indigenous Student Led Indigenous Art Purchase Program, a two-year pilot project that aims to change that. The group of Indigenous students meets with artists and curators, visits studios and recommends artwork to purchase.

The move comes amid a larger debate about what to do with art that reflects a colonial and imperialist history.

A reminder of home and community

The committee has received $30,000 from the school’s Office of the Vice-President (Indigenous). It’s submitted 24 proposals for paintings, prints, physical pieces and an etching, by artists including Jackie Traverse, Christi Belcourt and Kent Monkman. The group hopes to acquire them over the summer, and show them as part of an exhibition at the School of Art Gallery in October before installing them throughout the campus.

Third-year student Jory Thomas, 20, says she jumped at the opportunity to get involved as the project’s committee co-ordinator.

She remembers how overwhelmed she felt starting her architecture degree at the university. At the time, she said, there wasn’t a lot of Indigenous art on campus.

“Seeing pieces like that reminds me of home. It reminds me of community and it creates that sense of familiarity that gets you comfortable with being here … and ready to learn,” said Thomas, who is Red River Métis.

“The university is sending a message to students [that] you are welcome here.”

Removed paintings

One painting removed from the university president’s office is a work by Lionel Stephenson, an artist living in Winnipeg between 1885 and 1892.

The painting shows Upper Fort Garry on one side of the river, with an Indigenous person sitting outside a teepee on the other shore.

“It’s kind of depicting a ‘We’re over here and they’re over there’ type situation,” Thomas said. “It’s not showing community and togetherness. It’s showing the separation between the river and the settlement.”

It shows “the threat of direct colonization,” Brooks-Ip said.

Another is a sculpture of a buffalo hunt by Thomas Holland, an American artist and polo player. It portrays an Indigenous hunter riding a horse and spearing a buffalo.

While the depiction may be historically accurate, it wasn’t created from an Indigenous perspective of cultural understanding, respect and gratitude for the animal’s sacrifice, said Thomas, whose clan animal is the buffalo.

Images like this perpetuate harmful stereotypes of angry, violent Indigenous people, fostering a hostile environment on campus, she said.

“Instead of this violent attacking of the bison, there might be a better option of a sculpture, where they’re preparing the bison that they’ve hunted, because we historically used all the parts of the bison,” she said.

A new piece

One of the new pieces is by Frederick Lyle Spence, also known as Thunder Bear, an Ojibway carver from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba. It’s a soapstone carving of a black silhouette of a goose, with a dream catcher in its body, called “Let your dreams fly, for they will bring you home.”

Spence carved it in March, and he said it’s been waiting for the right home ever since.

“If I’m not ready to let it go it, one of the things I’ve been told is that it’s meant to stay and absorb your love and your positive energy,” Spence said.

“And when it’s ready, it’ll go to its new home and then it’ll sit and give off that energy to whoever is around it.”

He said he felt humbled and honoured when the university asked to buy it, especially when he reflected on his own experienc e as a student at the University of Winnipeg, which he said made him feel ashamed of his identity and his “Peguis” accent.

“I didn’t feel welcomed. I didn’t end up having a huge community or connection with the university, which is sad.”

What to do with colonial art?

For years, art institutions have deliberated on what to do with works that reflect a colonial history — should they be relegated to vaults or reframed with an Indigenous perspective and context as an educational opportunity?

“We do need to put things away to make space for other voices to be heard and seen. Sometimes we need to put things away because they’re traumatic, because they are harmful … especially to our Indigenous visitors and audiences,” she said. “And we don’t want to instill more trauma on our communities.”

However, she said, artworks can occasionally be reframed or retold from a different point of view, giving a new understanding of them.

A provincial spokesperson said that review is now complete, and that all but one piece was confirmed to have been made by Indigenous artists. The remaining piece’s artist is unknown, and has been taken down until it can be identified.

Society is going through a paradigm shift, changing how we view our history and looking for new ways of dealing with our colonial past, Symko said. Art can spur conversation and dialogue, she said.

“The future will tell whether we burn them down, or whether we store them away and lock them in the vault, or whether we bring them out and use them for discussion.”

While Indigenous art is the focus right now, U Manitoba is currently auditing its entire collection and “keeping an eye out for things that might be problematic.”

Brooks-Ip says if this pilot project can be extended or expanded, he would also be interested in looking for art reflecting other racialized and queer communities.

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