Japan: October 20,  2018 to February 24,  2019
Nature’s Nation: October 13, 2018 to January 6, 2019 and Peabody Essex Museum, February 2 to May 5, 2019

We are well used to the linguistic truism that language is culture. Now, two dynamic, partially overlapping exhibitions at the Princeton Art Museum explore its corollary in the visual arts, in which landscape is culture. “Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,” and “Picturing Place in Japan,” serve as point and counterpoint. Although initially planned independently, both shows disrupt usual ways of looking at iconic works while interrogating the ways that visual depictions of place tell us  much about cultural and historic attitudes towards the natural world and our environment. Perhaps most significantly, each exhibition includes contemporary works that bear witness to ecological disaster, whether in Tohoku, Japan or the Arctic National refuge in Alaska.

At the entrance to Picturing Place in Japan , the visual center of this first gallery and in some ways the entire show, is a magnificent ink painting, “Mountains and Water,” by Tani Buncho (1763-1841), which unfolds across a pair of six-fold gold leaf screens. In contrast to the Western tradition of painting, in which the compositional action occurs within a square or rectangle and the painting is meant to be taken in by the viewer in a stationary position as they look at it head on, Chinese and Japanese scroll paintings are viewed from left to right; to look is to take a visual journey, moving across screens, or unrolling a scroll to reveal the full composition. Here, the painting follows the folds of the panels for just over twelve feet, making use of their movement to reveal a landscape of mountains and water. A narrative unfolds and at its dramatic conclusion, the scholar who has arrived by boat to contemplate the scene makes his appearance, serene under a massive rock formation. The effect is operatic, the brushwork that has come before — at times as gently black as mist, at other times a staccato flurry —  builds to a crescendo here in the swirling black strokes of the rock formation.

The physicality of the brushwork is what commands attention; the painter appears to have been moving his ink-laden brush like a fevered conductor. And yet, the scene is one of contemplation, of absolute stillness. How can this be? This visual paradox, and the rhythms of the making evident in the masterful brushwork, create the compelling imagery. If there is a Pavarotti here, it is not the quiet Chinese scholar but the rocks themselves, depicted in urgent of dark strokes. So begins this small gem of an exhibition, featuring 35 carefully chosen works which from the onset, challenges viewers to re- think the pictorial representation of place in Japanese art while offering an opportunity to view masterpieces from the Gitter-Yelen collection along with works from Princeton’s own collection.

“Our idea was to put together a show of landscape painting,” commented Andrew M. Watsky,” Professor of Japanese Art and Archeology, who curated the show with Phd candidate, Caitlin Karyadi, “without using the word ‘landscape’. We wanted to expand popular ideas of ink brush painting… to help people see beyond the usual expectations of what Japanese art should be.” The curators set out to achieve this through a division of the show into three main themes: imagined places,” “famous places,” and “sacred places.”

In contrast to traditions of Western painting concerned with mimesis, Japanese ink painting eschews realistic representation. The emphasis is upon the possibilities of brushwork and the resulting tonality in the handling of black ink on paper, silk, or in the case of the magnificent Tani Buncho screen, on the hard surface of a screen covered in gold leaf. What constitutes “landscape” is also radically different from Western painting traditions. Japanese pictorial vision relied on invented scenes, literally called sansui, “mountains and water,” or as in the case of the Tani Buncho gold screen, an imagined China.

From this first work onward, the exhibition makes evident central differences in Western and Eastern thought about the relationship of man and nature. In the Tani Buncho screen, the first panel, which leads you into the natural world, includes the detail of a mountain hut; signs of man are evident even in a landscape that is fit for the contemplation of a scholar. “Nature “as a subject of contemplation is not something apart from man, but rather, man is as much a part of nature as the mountains and water.  Even the language of comparison becomes tricky. Not only does the term “landscape,” (which derives from the German word landschaft, denoting agriculture), not apply to Japanese ink painting, but neither does the word“nature,” which does not even exist in the Japanese language. The closest Japanese word, “shizen,” which only entered the language in the 19^th Century through translations of Western texts which used the word nature, is used primarily as an adjective meaning to act naturally, or in keeping with one’s essential nature. Naming is of course a critical act of separation of self from the object being named. In Western religion and philosophy, the concept of man versus nature has been an enduring theme.

The exhibition also displays refreshing levels of wit. While the dynamic gold screen of the first gallery is balanced on the left with a large and powerfully composed 19-century ink painting of a pine tree with mountains and water, just to the right is a small scroll titled Bonseki, painted by the famous ink painter Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1768). Hakuin was known for his many works that reflect Zen themes, but this small painting is an admonition — a pointed critique of the licentious practices of monks. The subject of the ink painting is of a bonseki, a rock garden in a bowl, but in rendering this landscape within a landscape, Hakuin modified the shape of the mountain to create a phallus shape, even denoting dark marks that could be pubic hair.  Double entendre indeed. Similarly, a small ink painting on the opposite wall, cleverly titled “Painting,” by Tachihara Kyoshu, (1785-1840) depicts a scholar setting to work on a painting of an outdoor scene, beginning with a mountain, but soon details make it clear that this scholar is seated inside and the mountain he paints is from his imagination.

The second room of the show considers a grouping of ink paintings and wood block prints best understood in the context of “famous places” or meisho.  Here we confront beloved sites in Japan such as Mt. Fuji and the Tokkaido Highway. Most memorable here are the vivid examples of the deep connection between Japanese poetry and ink painting. One playful work, which takes the interaction between poetry and ink painting to an almost obsessive extreme, is the small scroll, “Mt Fuji of Poems” In this work, the noted painter, Yamaguchi Shido (1765-1842) has constructed an image of the mountain by writing out the lines of 100 poems about the mountain. In his commentary he humorously writes that although he was 78 years old, he had managed to write out the minute lines of verse without his glasses.

One of the delights of this exhibition is that the works in each room balance one another, creating a movement of imagery and idea. In the final room, are depictions of reijo, “sacred places.” Historically, the entire Japanese archipelago is considered the realm of the Gods and as such, is filled with pilgrimage sites.  In this final room we encounter a range of scrolls and hangings that depict pilgrimage sites, the most memorable being the spectacular “Nachi Pilgrimage Mandala” painted from 1568 – 1600.  Colorful, elaborately detailed eitoki, or storytelling scrolls like this one were used to encourage pilgrims to visit shrines as well as to educate pilgrims about the shrine upon arrival. The show concludes in this room with beautiful but dire photographs by three contemporary photographers who made images about Tohoku after the great earthquake, tsunami and resulting meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor in 2011.

Thus, as it concludes this exhibition opens, interrogating the aesthetic and ethical problem of making art that depicts tragedy. We are left wondering, what is the role of beauty in the face of environmental disaster?

Across the hall an alluring gold wall shines like a beacon. Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment  opens with an iconic work of 19th-century American landscape painting, Lower Falls, Yellowstone  painted by Thomas Moran in 1893. This ambitious show, which includes over 100 objects, lives up to its aims of re-thinking the history of American art in light of ecology and environmental history, and to do so by exploring the diversity and dynamism of American works.

In this introductory gallery, paintings by Moran and Alfred Bierstadt which resonate with a romantic vision of the 19th-century wilderness ideal are seen alongside works by contemporary artists Valerie Hegarty and Subhankar Banerjee that challenge us to consider the fate of our American wilderness in the face of environmental degradation. Hegarty’s piece, in foam core, wood and paint, deconstructs Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls Yosemite, painted 1871-73. In her installation, Bierstadt’s romantic vision of nature has been burned, perforated and rendered unstable, bits of it piled on the floor in what amounts to a stark critique of the idea of nature as something pristine, apart and thus enduring.

Within a few steps we encounter an historic work by the African American painter, Grafton Tylor Brown (1841-1918), his View of the Lower Falls, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1890, and soon a magnificent early 19th-century Chilkat robe woven by a Tlingit artist living on the Northwest coast.  Another strong contemporary painting, Browning of America 2000, by Native American artist Jane Quick-to-See Smith uses a map of the United States to create a palimpsest of Native American cultures displaced by European settlers. In her image, the entire United States is washed over with brown, conjuring up environmental degradation as well as serving as a witty aside to future demographic trends in the U.S. We are reminded that visions of landscape reflect culture, history, and in very direct ways, the subject position of the viewer.  Just as refreshing, the stance of eco-critical art history, which extends beyond questions of representation to consider the environmental implications of materials, is introduced.  We pass the 1954 painting Intrigue by color field painter, Morris Louis, who made extensive use of turpentine to thin acrylic paint, and an 18th-century piece of luxury mahogany furniture, made in Philadelphia from imported wood. We engage the ways art has always embodied ecological conditions – both materially and conceptually — whether the maker recognizes them or not.

By the time I had circled this first gallery, I felt as if I had just finished reading the first chapter of a novel where scene-establishing main characters in a particular setting ready the reader for the drama to unfold. What might seem overwhelming is made coherent and manageable for viewers by the show’s organization, which traces three major periods in the evolution of American art in response to nature: colonial beliefs about natural theology and biblical dominion; 19th-century notions of manifest destiny; and the 20th-century emergence of modern ecological ethics.

Environmental humanities is a relatively new and evolving field, but this show, the result of years of work by Princeton Art Museum Curator Karl Kusserow and the environmental historian, Alan Braddock, a Professor at William and Mary, who collaborated with a team of scholars, curators and museums, demonstrates the ways in which the eco-critical lens is both timely and moving.

The title of the exhibition, “Nature’s Nation” pays homage to the new republic’s urgent sense of exceptionalism, based in the idea that America was a place apart, a previously unpeopled and unspoiled wilderness where history could begin again – a new Eden.  As the exhibition reveals, there were twin dilemmas inherent in forming a collective identity based on this wilderness ideal. To begin with, North America was populated by indigenous people and far from empty. Just as important, this vision of America’s wilderness as the nation’s ethical, spiritual and aesthetic birthright went hand in hand with a ruthlessly extractive view of nature as raw material to be used for progress.

Moran’s dazzling depiction of the lower falls of Yellowstone is a stage for the dilemmas of “nature’s nation”: American wilderness is celebrated yet ready for colonization. Our eye is drawn immediately to the center, where the powerful falls crash down 300 feet, rendered with a quality of light that evokes beauty, truth and inspiration; we feast on a romantic vision of nature as all-powerful and beyond the reach of human ken. But as our eye travels the lines of cliffs and down through trees and rock formations, something interesting happens – the formal elements of composition begin to tame this wilderness. Symmetric and asymmetric forms are balanced by areas of intense light and dark, creating rhythms of looking, encouraging the eye through this painted landscape in an orderly and logical progression. We are not crashing through the underbrush, scratching ourselves on thorny vines and poison oak. Magnificent wilderness is rendered safe as a postcard, while the sloping cliffs and falls intensify the sense of space and openness. The visual logic of the painting not only supports the exceptionalism of America’s nature; it renders this wilderness critically spacious and empty, ready for settlement.

Our visual occupancy is not coincidental. Moran, who came to sign his name TYM – Thomas Yellowstone Moran – made a series of paintings of Yellowstone, including this one, to celebrate the founding of this first U. S. National park. While the establishment of national parks did not resolve the conflict of opposing ideas of wilderness in America, it did temporarily hold the conflict at bay, for in areas like Yellowstone nature was to be enshrined and protected.

It is when we leave this first gallery that we face perhaps the most haunting work of all, a stark aerial photograph by contemporary artist, Subhankar Banarjee titled Caribou Migration 1, 2002. In this large Ultrachrome print, pregnant caribou migrate to calving grounds on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Refuge in northern Alaska – a site where oil companies and some members of Congress advocate petroleum extraction. What is most unsettling about this image is that at first glance, the caribou on the fields of white and blue register as just tiny black dots – statistics of climate change. Only up close does one realize that those black dots are pregnant caribou, urgently looking for ways to cross the melting ice to get to feeding grounds in time to calve.

The photograph is disturbingly beautiful, taking us back to those concluding  photographs of Picturing Place in Japan.  In both instances, images of climate change and environmental degradation force honest consideration of place as we  bear witness to ecological crisis.

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In the preface to The White Road: Journey of an Obsession, Edmund de Waal quotes Melville’s famous phrase from Moby Dick, “What is this thing of whiteness?” This connection to Captain Ahab’s literal and symbolic quest for a white whale is apt, for in his ambitious new book, de Waal sets out to track the origins of porcelain production, traveling to China, then Dresden and finally his homeland, England. We follow him up and down literal hills of porcelain mining and production to seek the origins of three talismanic objects: the famed Monk’s Cap Ewer, said to be the first porcelain object made in China; the Tschirnhaus cup, the first piece made in the West; and the William Cookworthy tankard, the first true porcelain made in England.

These three works become de Waal’s Holy Grail and it is no surprise that in the preface he declares himself a pilgrim—although certainly no novice. His writings on ceramics are well known and he is the author of the Hare with Amber Eyes, the best-selling book that also pursued the complex stories that lie behind certain objects, in that instance his family’s collection of Japanese Netsuke. De Waal is a leading British ceramicist whose works in porcelain have been shown internationally. In the course of his global search for information about porcelain, de Waal speculates about on his own love of white clay, with flash backs to his beginnings as a potter and musings on a life spent hands deep in porcelain’s magical whiteness. Stories of great collectors, connoisseurs, inventors and clay entrepreneurs fascinate de Waal because on some level they are stories of fellow obsessives. He recounts their tales with refreshing directness, often with a humorous bent, bringing them to life on the page as idiosyncratic humans as well as historic figures.

With so much historical material from which to construct his narrative, there are times when his book begins to feel as encyclopedic and sprawling as Moby Dick, but it is spared the tragic mania of Ahab for at every turn de Waal delights in the information he is gathering. He remains an enthusiastic explorer even when the wealth and complexity of the subject threaten to overwhelm him.

We commence in Jingdezhen province, China where over 1,000 years ago, ceramic production began. Here de Waal climbs his first hill, Mt. Kao-ling, the “High Ridge” where kaolin was mined for imperial kilns. Two minerals are necessary to porcelain: petunse, known as porcelain stone, supplies the translucency and hardness of the clay body while kaolin, or porcelain clay, is critical for plasticity. As de Waal records, wherever there is porcelain there is first the twin search for these elements, then a period of experimentation, trial and much error. Petunse is not hard to find, but kaolin is. By 1585, the hillsides of Mt. Kao-ling were latticed with mines pulling up the valuable mineral. Such was the Chinese love of porcelain that as early as 1554, the Jiajing Emperor could send an orders to the imperial kilns for 26,350 bowls with dragons on them in blue, 30,500 places of the same design, 6,900 cups and more.

De Waal’s second hill, as he calls it, is his journey to Dresden, where the “Tschirnhaus cup” was made for the Elector of Saxony, Augustus the Strong, through the combined efforts of mathematician and philosopher Ehrenfried Walther von  Tschirnhaus and an inventor named Bottgen. It was a modest production in comparison with Chinese porcelains. But as de Waal sets out to illustrate by weaving together the stories of these men with Augustus II, who became elector in 1694, this object represents the origin of Meissen porcelain. De Waal has fun connecting the development of the West’s first porcelain to the appetites of a powerful ruler who, in his own words, suffered from “la maladie de porcelain, die Porzellenkrankheit.” Augustus inherited a royal collection of around 15 items but by the time of his death had collected 35,798 pieces.

The third journey delves the complex story of the birth of English porcelain. Here de Waal seeks the completion of his Holy Grail by tracking down the origin of a tankard made by William Cookworthy, dated March 14, 1768. In this section, many stories collide and interweave, including early colonial American history, for some of the first white clay in England was imported from Appalachia where the Cherokee had located and mined white clay that they used for making pipes. The indefatigable de Waal tracks down the various overlapping endeavors of merchants and clay entrepreneurs, including Josiah Wedgewood whose creamware production in Stoke-on Trent would become Britain’s most famous ceramic industry.

Keeping track of these journeys can be challenging, but whenever de Waal dwells on particular pieces of porcelain, his writing soars. At one point, for instance, he discusses the differences between Japanese and Chinese porcelain, focusing on the tradition of Kakiemon ware. Here his in-depth knowledge of porcelain and sensitive looking results in a stunning passage. He writes: “The colors of Kakiemon are dense and rich and clearly delineated with the blue of the night sky, carmine reds, yolky yellows and a purple that is used for painting peonies and actually has the velvet bruise of a peony.”

While some might be content with this physical description, de Waal extends his looking by considering the significance of the motifs. “The images are much closer to the dynamic spaces of an ink painting of a landscape than you would expect in a pot.” He then connects this type of surface decoration with story. “There is no attempt to tidy it up or repeat bits of decoration to set up rhythms. It is image, a story, and it is emptiness.” Finally, he concludes the passage with the personal declaration: “This is what makes this kind of porcelain so irresistible. The quail at the scattering of millet is focus and greed and not-being-clever and everyone gets that. And come to think of it, the phoenix is just a courtesan being oh so special off and about.” (p.152)

Moments like these take us back to the personable, curious first-person narrator of Hare with Amber Eyes interrogating history with a lively fresh perspective. In many ways, this is de Waal at his best, evoking the voice of the personal essayist, what Montaigne, father of the genre, called the “accidental philosopher.” A good essayist must believe as Montaigne asserted that “every man has in himself the entire human condition.” It is this belief that allows a writer like de Waal to take us on his long seemingly esoteric quest and trust that he will find communion with his readers, making his tale our own.

Edmund De Waal. The White Road: Journey into an Obsession. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). ISBN 978 0 374 28926 3, 417pp, $27

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April 28 to September 27, 2015
2 Columbus Circle
New York City, 212 299 7777

traveling to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, October 30, 2015 to February 28, 2016

The stated purpose of this show is to consider the notable contributions of women to modernism in postwar visual culture. Certainly an argument can be made for paying more attention to the contributions women within craft traditions, particularly in the 1950s and ’60s, an era when painting, sculpture and architecture were largely dominated by men. Artists such as Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, Toshiko Takaezu and Karen Karnes used such materials as metals, textiles and clay in ways that push their work toward fine art concerns, demanding to be seen in a fine art context. Yet to date, while each of these artists is well known, their collective contribution has remained unexamined.

The current show at MAD aims to adjust this imbalance, in part through sheer volume of works presented — over 100 individual works by 42 artists fill every gallery on two floors. The range is comprehensive and ambitious. By including important Scandinavian designers such as Rut Bryky and Vivianna Torun Brulow-Hube, the parallels between women working in Scandinavia and the United States are highlighted. And by focusing on European émigrés such as Anni Albers and Maija Grotell, the legacy of modernism within American craft is established. Bauhaus trained, Albers and Grotell brought with them the conviction that craft could serve as an arena of modernist innovation.

The exhibition begins on the second floor where it focuses on a particular cadre of artists, who besides Asawa, Karnes, Lenore Tawney and Takaezu included Sheila Hicks and Alice Kogawa Parrott, who were influential as designers, makers and teachers. As the show points out, this pioneering group came to maturity along with the Museum of Arts and Design itself, which was founded in 1956 at the center of the emerging American modern craft movement.

Marianne Strengell and Grotell taught for many years at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where their students included Takaezu and Parrott. The placement of works by mentors, protégés and colleagues underlines the networks and alliances that influenced and sustained these women throughout their careers.

Many pairings of “craft” and “fine art” have been integrated to encourage viewers to reconsider traditional categories and, de facto, to rethink modernist narrative in light of gender. For the most part this works well, although some of the pairings need more explanation. It is not clear why works by Lee Krasner and Eva Hesse, for example, have been paired with Takaezu and Tawney. They didn’t influence each other much and the formal connections are slight. But this is a minor quibble in what is otherwise a feast of works by women rarely seen together on this scale.

One need only think of the careers of male artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Peter Voulkos and Scott Burton, to recognize the need to further examine the concerns raised by this show. Noguchi did a great deal of design work throughout his career, including lamps, chairs, set design but he was always located firmly within a fine arts context. Voulkos made wheel-thrown vessels throughout his life, but he is widely recognized for pushing clay into the realm of sculpture. Perhaps the most dramatic comparison might be Burton, who designed objects out of marble and stone intended to be viewed aesthetically while at the same time functioning as chairs, tables, etc. This paradigm can be traced right back to Constantin Brancusi whose Endless Column ensemble, erected in Romania in 1934, includes a large stone table with twelve stone chairs that Brancusi himself felt was as important to the whole as the column itself. The point being that male artists have not had problems playing with craft traditions and making utilitarian objects, but women who made work in craft areas were historically relegated to this arena.

Nevertheless, the exhibition at MAD is celebratory. Viewers venturing through the connected rooms will make many surprising discoveries: Marianne Strengell’s Forecast, a rug made from 80% aluminum for Alcoa; framed weavings by Anni Albers; a striking metal construction by Vivian Beer for instance. A piece titled DE—SIGN by Gabriel Ann Mahler, which includes a garment and a video exploring stereotypical male and female postures and clothing, was a revelation for this viewer. For the most part, the fourth floor is filled with later generations of artists and designers. Yet, as one enters these galleries, dominated for the most part by works of industrial design, one encounters an interesting counterpoint and nod to design legacy in a pairing of ceramic works by British ceramicist Magdelane Odundo. These raven-black clay forms are stunning: they provoke, startle and mystify by being at once vessel and sculptural form.

One of the delightful ironies of the exhibition is that it includes the work of contemporary artists such as Polly Apfelbaum. Apfelbaum is firmly rooted in a fine art context but her large, site-specific installation of textiles was inspired by A Handweavers Pattern Book. She pushes back toward a craft heritage by choosing not to paint on stretched canvas but on silk in such a way that the piece spreads out as a series of colored scarves. She confidently makes feminist connections to craft and clothing.

“Pathmakers” does a great deal to meet its goal of locating women within central currents of mid-century modernist narrative. Most importantly, this exhibition opens the opportunity for new lines of enquiry into the intersections of craft, gender and modernism.

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October 11, 2014 to February 01, 2015
McCormick Hall
Princeton, NJ, 609 258 3788

This extraordinary exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum vividly updates our understandings of chanoyu, popularly called the “tea ceremony,” and in doing so illustrates not just the truism that every aesthetic is a construction, but raises provocative and timely questions about the very nature of art making. Originating early last year in a larger version at the Freer Sackler Gallery, Washington DC, the Princeton show runs through February 1.

At the core of this exhibition is a ceramic fairytale. The show illustrates how an ordinary brown storage jar made by a team of workers in southern China in the late 14^th century, was transformed through a complex process of seeing, naming, owning and displaying into one of Japan’s most revered tea objects. Chigusa, the jar in question, arrived in Japan along with many others just like it and managed to survive the shipping and use as a storage jar for about 200 years. That is until one day when a tea connoisseur discovered the jar, probably at a market, but possibly at a temple auction and saw in its brown glaze and strong sloping sides, the qualities much admired by tea masters and acquired it. Soon after the jar was named Chigusa, a poetic allusion meaning “myriad things,“ which immediately infused the jar with semantic power for with this naming, the jar referenced a revered medieval poem.

That moment of selection and naming would lead to a 4-lugged storage jar becoming a coveted work of art. By the end of the 16th century, Chigusa, traveled like a racehorse, accompanied by boxes of accumulated belongings – ornamental ropes and Chinese textiles to seasonally adorn it, documents of pedigree, ownership and admiration, as well as with Chinese scrolls. The jar was the Elvis Presley of medieval world of tea, one of the highest traditional arts forms in Japan. References to Chigusa appear in the diaries of the major tea chroniclers, who wrote of the awe they felt in having had the chance to view it. The military warlords who ruled Japan during the 16^th century vied to acquire one of the few recognized meibutsu (tea treasures) such as Chigusa; to own Chigusa was to possess some of the power and prestige of shoguns.

The creative act that turned a brown jar into Chigusa was an act of selection. If you are now thinking of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and his famous 1917 prank Fountain, you are on the right path. At its core this show challenges us to think hard about the nature of art; not just about the ways in which art is a commodity, but as in the case of Duchamp’s readymades, the ways in which the creative act can shift from the making of an art object to the selection of an object to be classified as a work of art. The story of Chigusa is fascinating example of how an object accrues value as a work of art and the power of narrative to create our perceptions of what art is. As the show details, by the end of the 16^th century, references to Chigusa in tea diaries had so increased its value that eventually a letter written by the most famous tea master, the mythic Sen No Rikyu was included in the grouping of Chigusas many accessories, even though Rikyu had never seen the jar.

Walking into the show, which covers three small rooms, each of which is designed to look both into the next room and out into the larger collection of the American wing, one immediately encounters Chigusa, the simple brown jar at the heart of the story.

Captions surrounding the jar detail the qualities that made Chigusa superlative as a tea object, the flow of glaze, the urazame or quail feather pattern of the glaze, the slight grooves at the base of the neck created by being turned on the potter’s wheel. To the right is a replica of a 5 mat tatami room such as one that tea men would have used for preparing and serving matcha complete with a beautifully chosen array of tea utensils. To the left is a case holding Chigusa’s impressive Pawlonia wood nesting boxes. In the second room is one of the most surprising elements, a video of a tea master ritually “dressing” Chigusa in a complex process of adorning the pot with ceremonial blue ropes and a silk mouth cover.

Viewers unfamiliar with chanoyu will gain an excellent sense of the art of tea through the range of tea objects, each accompanied with captions that both provide context and challenge viewers to look anew at these historic objects. In a wonderful touch, the final room of the exhibition displays a scroll of the famed tea master, Sen No Rikyu, but when you view the scroll, you can also see over your left shoulder out into the larger American wing where a white marble statue of Diana and iconic landscape paintings such as Alfred Bierstadt’s Mt. Adams, Washington (1875), enable one to connect this exhibit with Western traditions of art making. In this context, the exhibition makes the art of tea seem less remote and exotic.

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