When you first walk into the Chazen Museum’s Japanese Masterworks Exhibit, the first thing that strikes you is the lighting. It’s decidedly, well, soft and flattering. And the reason it looks more like a boudoir than an art gallery is the same reason the prints only go on display once per decade. It's to protect the delicate inks of the woodblock prints.
The prints come from the last half of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Curator Drew Stevens says the collection was twenty years in the making, and includes some prints from a collector, who in turn received them from architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Evidently Wright owed the collector some money and offered the prints as payment.
In this edition of Radio Chipstone, contributor gianofer fields met Stevens at the Chazen, where he explained that the main reason some of the prints still exist is because there were so many of them:
Gianofer Fields studies material culture at UW-Madison and is the curator of "Radio Chipstone" - a project funded by the Chipstone Foundation, a decorative arts foundation whose mission is preserving and interpreting their collection, as well as stimulating research and education in the decorative arts.
