The exhibition opening is almost here! Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami opens this Saturday with a big day of origami activities at our March Target Free Family Saturday event.
For Museum Members, we hope you can join us for the special Members’ Preview on Friday night. The program will include curator Meher McArthur and our new President & CEO G.W. Kimura.
To learn more about Folding Paper, visit janm.org for information about the exhibition, a list of related public programs, artist bios, and photos. You can also download an origami resources list from the Activities page.
I wanted to post this yesterday for the actual Hinamatsuri Day, but in our family Hinamatsuri lasts all of March, so this is as good a time as any! We are proud to be offering another tea collaboartion with Chado, this time a very light and Spring-y offering of green bancha tea with safflowers, marigolds and peach pieces.
The signature flower for Hinamatsuri is the peach blossom. In fact the celebration is also know as Momo no Sekku (Peach Blossom Festival–For a beautiful vision of this, check out Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams” movie.)
One whiff of this tea and you will want to picnic under a flowering peach tree! (This item will be online in about 24 hours!)
Tried postinbg this earlier on the JANM FB page, but it seems to have disappeared. Just wanted to give a shout out to our new CEO who we officially welcomed at an All Staff meeting yesterday. He was given the grand tour of our messy office (we are working on tidying it up, really…) and has been chatting with staff here and there. Hope he is finding all the cool places to eat downtown and isn’t too homesick for Alaskan cuisine.
Last month, JANM held its first two-day shibori workshop with Shibori Girl that focused on indigo dyeing. Students had unlimited access to vats of both natural and synthetic indigo for two days of intense shibori immersion. A dream come true for some of us. Glennis Dolce, Shibori Girl herself, provided each student with an assortment of natural fabrics for experimentation and taught both basic and intermediate shibori techniques.
On the first day, students were a bit timid about trying the different shibori techniques and the dyeing process. But by the second day, students had transformed into passionate avant-garde artists dyeing everything from pieces of leftover string to their own clothing while experimenting with the various stitching, tying and clamping techniques.
Bounty from the Two-Day Workshop
There’s this wonderful aspect of shibori – you really don’t know what your piece will look like after all that stitching, binding, clamping, and dyeing. The process of unwrapping your fabric and seeing the finished piece is magical. Whether hours were spent hand-stitching an intricate pattern or the fabric was quickly folded and clamped, each project seemed to turn out beautifully.
Thank you Glennis for a fantastic weekend workshop! And thanks to the shibori classmates who were not only inspirational but really fun. More fun please.
♦ ♦ ◊ ♦ ♦
ABOUT OUR WORKSHOPS
Our cultural art and cooking workshops feature excellent instructors like shibori artist Glennis Dolce and food writer Sonoko Sakai and attract a wonderfully eclectic group of students – and the most devoted – some traveling from Northern California, Palm Springs and even Michigan!
UPCOMING WORKSHOPS
The next Shibori Girl workshop will be held on Saturday, March 3 featuring silk and color dyes. The next soba making workshop will be on Sunday, March 11 with Ms. Sakai. Reserve a spot by calling (213) 625-0414.
Since our Store update email won't be going out until next week, I thought I'd post this on the blog. We are pleased to announce the return of Noe Yamabe's Camp Mon Shirt, specially made for the Museum.
Whew! I can’t believe it’s already been a week since I was in Michigan celebrating the opening of our exhibition Fighting for Democracy: Who is the “We” in “We the People?” at the Arab American National Museum. Not only did the Great Lakes State welcome me with surprisingly warm weather (a very important detail for this Southern Californian) but, the warm welcome and generous hospitality from the fantastic staff at the AANM made it a great trip.
It’s always interesting to see this exhibit installed in the various cities to which it’s traveled. Whether it is displayed in Philadelphia where the Constitution was signed, steps away from the actual Constitution on the National Mall, or in Hawai‘i where we joined Domingo Los Baños (one of the individuals featured in the exhibit) in his home state, each place adds different meaning and significance to the exhibit. The Arab American National Museum is the 8th stop on Fighting for Democracy’s tour and it is an institution that we, at JANM feel a special connection with. Not only do we share the commonality of being culturally specific museums that promote the appreciation of our country’s diversity; but, we also have common histories and stories that are particularly important to share as we consider parallels between the Japanese American World War II experience and the treatment of Arab Americans following the events of September 11, 2001.
What is great about Fighting for Democracy traveling to AANM right now is that is goes along so well with their current exhibition Patriots & Peacemakers: Arab Americans in Service to our Country. Linking the past to the present, both exhibitions focus on individual personal stories as a way to think about broader stories and the bigger picture. I think that’s a great way to make meaning.
Many thanks to the wonderful people at the Arab American National Museum for being so welcoming and for working so hard to get the exhibition up. If you’re in the area, be sure to go see our friends in Dearborn. It is a great museum and definitely worth a stop!
January 30 is Fred T. Korematsu’s birthday! He would have been 93 years old.
Gift of Tsuyako “Sox” Kitashima, Japanese American National Museum (98.152.1).
In 2010 Governor Schwarzenegger signed AB 1775, calling for all Californians to annually recognize January 30 as “Fred T. Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.” This is the first and only “day” named for an Asian American anywhere in the nation.
This day commemorates a young man who disobeyed the government’s 1942 order that excluded all people of Japanese ancestry, without due process, from the West Coast. Korematsu was arrested and eventually removed to a Japanese American concentration camp in Utah. He appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in 1944 the Court ruled against him, declaring that the exclusion and confinement of people of Japanese descent was justified.
[He didn’t mention any of this to his daughter, Karen. She only found out about it in high school when her classmate was assigned to read a book about a man named Fred Korematsu. She thought, “That can’t be my father!”]
In 1983 and with the efforts of a very sharp, pro bono legal team, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction. Though relieved, it concerned Korematsu that the decision Korematsu v. United States remains on the books. He continued to vigilantly fight for the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, filing two amicus briefs following 9/11.
Korematsu Institute’s Fred Korematsu Day Logo
Fred Korematsu passed away in 2005, at age 86. Karen continues her father’s legacy. She co-founded the Korematsu Institute and goes to schools to share her father’s story with young people.
This is just a brief post about Fred Korematsu. There are many ways to learn more. The Los Angeles County Office of Education‘s video from a recent student program featuring Karen Korematsu will soon be available on-line. (See Christy’s re-cap of the program here.) JANM has a high school mock trial lesson plan created by Texas teacher, Mark Hansen. On February 2, Korematsu will become the first Asian American to have his portrait included in the Struggle for Justice exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. And the Korematsu Institute is aggregating activities taking place around the nation to celebrate Korematsu Day 2012.
We hope that you, too, will celebrate the legacy of Fred Korematsu, a man who fought for our civil rights.
And I’m letting my Chinese side take over here so this won’t seem like a belated New Year’s greeting!
Well, I’m off to the New York Gift Show this weekend and I’m hoping to find new and exciting things there. For many of my vendors this is the only time we get to meet in person. I know that the world has changed and we are all getting used to shopping online (and believe me, I’m glad you do shop online!) but sometimes I just have to see stuff in real life to be assured that it is of good enough quality to offer to all of you.
New York is also a great place to check out other museum stores and see what’s happening on the other side of the country.
If I can get my technology to cooperate, I will try and post photos of some of the people that make and sell the items you have come to love in our store!
To let you know how busy things are here at the Museum, I totally forgot that yesterday was the last day for the Stan Sakai Labbit auction. Imagine my surprise to get an email from eBay notifying us that Stan’s Labbit sold for over $1500! Stan has graciously donated the proceeds of this sale to the Museum, and for that we are grateful. We are also proud to have helped Stan participate in his first custom toy show!
If you’d like a taste of what is in the exhibition, all of the Drawing the Line artist videos are online now. You can check them out on our YouTube channel.
Together with a group of guest musicians and activists from the 1960s/‘70s and the present, Miyamoto brings alive the dynamic moment when her 1973 album “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle of Asians in America,” created a heartbeat for the Asian American Movement and shared rhythms with Black, Latino, and Native American cultural and political activists.
General admission is $10, students is $5, and it’s FREE for members of JANM and LACE! Tickets available at the door.
One last Drawing the Line update! We asked Yoshimi Kawashima (a former intern and current JANM volunteer!) to write an article about Gidra magazine for our Discover Nikkei site. Yoshimi is a current UCLA student active with the Nikkei Student Union (NSU), so thought she’d appreciate the assignment. We think she did a great job! GIDRA: The Voice of the Asian American Movement
Update (added 1/20/12): We’ve pulled together a Nikkei Album on our Discover Nikkei site with all of the Drawing the Line videos with brief summaries of each video. Check it out >>
