Visiting Tokyo artist Yoshisuke Funasaka and Kalamazoo artist Mary Brodbeck will speak about Cross Currents: East/West, their joint woodblock print exhibition showing at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center from May 12 to July 28. The artists will offer insights into Japanese art, culture, and cross-cultural exchange.
Japanese woodblock prints are characteristically spatially flat, graphic, and colorful – as Funasaka’s modern abstractions are in this exhibition. Brodbeck’s prints are perhaps a combination of East and West with the landscape as a traditional Japanese subject matter, yet portrayed with a Western eye using layers of dark on light to create form and distance. Brodbeck studied woodblock printmaking in Tokyo with Funasaka during a five-month fellowship from the Japanese government 25 years ago. This is the latest of several exhibitions they have had together since, featuring both artists' use of the historic 17th-century Japanese woodblock technique.
Yoshisuke Funasaka is a Tokyo-based woodblock and silkscreen printmaker best known for his repeated depictions of various themes. Since the 1970s, Funasaka has taught the traditional methods of Japanese woodblock printmaking at Asahi Culture Center in Tokyo. Over the decades, his teaching expertise has been sought after internationally, and he has hosted students from Malaysia, England, Indonesia, and the U.S. His colorful artwork is in collections at prominent American museums including the Freer Gallery of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and many others worldwide.
Mary Brodbeck studied Japanese woodblock printmaking in Tokyo with Yoshisuke Funasaka while an MFA candidate in printmaking at Western Michigan University (1998-99). Her nature-inspired woodblock prints are held in many private and public collections, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Frederik Meijer Garden & Sculpture Park, and the Muskegon Museum of Art. She produced an award-winning documentary about the woodblock printmaking process in 2014, titled Becoming Made. Brodbeck teaches woodblock printmaking workshops throughout the U.S. and abroad.