Thursday 9 July, 2026
6:00pm BST - 7:30pm BST
Keynote lecture for the Ishibashi Foundation Network Leader Fellowship Workshop, Alternative Paths in Japanese Arts, in person at The Town Close Auditorium, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Castle Hill, Norwich, NR1 3JU, and online on Zoom.
Free and open to all, booking essential.
To check your time zone conversion if you are joining from outside the UK, click here.
To attend in person, please email sisjac@sainsbury-institute.org or call +44 (0) 1603 597507 to book your place. Zoom booking is available at the bottom of this page.
Speaker
Bert Winther-Tamaki (Academic Associate at the Sainsbury Institute, and Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine)
About the talk
The Japanese painter Kitagawa Tamiji (1897–1989) spent his early career in the United States and Mexico, from 1914 to 1936. He was affiliated with Mexico’s Open-Air Painting School Movement (Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, EPAL), first as a student, then as a teacher, and finally as director of his own small school in the town of Taxco. Kitagawa was deeply affected by the lives and struggles of poor rural and Indigenous children in Mexico, and keenly aware of the presence of tourists, artists, and educators from the United States. Like many advocates of progressive education, he prized the psychology and expressive life of the child. Yet his comparative attention to the social conditions of children in Mexico, the United States, and Japan led him toward a more radical educational agenda, in which art became a means of confronting poverty, social hierarchy, and the struggle for freedom. His attempts to implement this program in postwar Japan were frustrated, but he served as an influential catalyst in the emergence of a transnational network of artists, educators, and reformers linking Mexico and Japan in ways that continue to resonate today.
About the speaker
Bert Winther-Tamaki is an art historian specializing in the art and visual culture of modern and contemporary Japan. He is the author of four books, most recently TSUCHI: Earthy Materials in Contemporary Japanese Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), and numerous journal articles and chapters. Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, Winther-Tamaki is currently Academic Associate at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC) in Norwich, UK. Concurrently, he is working on a book titled Promethean Excesses of Contemporary Japanese Art in the Bubble, an ecocritical view of Japanese art during the 1980s and 1990s.
Image: Kitagawa Tamiji, Indian Sister and Brother, 1933. Hamamatsu City Art Museum.
