Massachusetts Institute of Technology © 2008 Visualizing Cultures
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The following institutions have generously opened their archives to Visualizing Cultures scholars and provided images from their collections for publication on the website: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution http://www.asia.si.edu Mid-19th-century Japanese prints from the Sackler’s William Leonhart Collection are the basis of a unit featuring the earliest Japanese images of “foreigners of the five nations” as seen—and more often just vividly imagined!—in the treaty-ports of the 1860s. Units: Yokohama Boomtown Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/index_e2.html The museum’s collection of over 2,000 paintings and drawings by survivors of the August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima is the basis of a VC unit on the world’s first “Ground Zero.” Done mostly in the early 1970s, these are the personal images of the nuclear experience that burned themselves on the minds of survivors. They provide the most intimate insight imaginable into the human dimension of nuclear warfare. Units: Ground Zero 1945 Honolulu Academy of Arts http://www.honoluluacademy.org The Academy provided VC with the spectacular “Black Ship Scroll” painted in Japan around 1854, at the time of the second Perry mission. A 1960 gift of Mrs. Walter F. Dillingham, in memory of Alice Perry Grew, VC has reconstructed this thirty-foot-long horizontal scroll in several formats, including a video that permits it to been seen “whole” by anyone for the first time. Both the contradictions within the scroll (such as jolly as well as demonic foreigners) and its frequent old-fashioned humor make this a rare visual “text.” Units: Black Ships & Samurai Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu Photography albums in the Hood Museum’s collection are the sources for several units by Dartmouth Professor of Art History Allen Hockley. These include a late 1860s album by pioneer photographer Felice Beato and a deluxe 10-volume edition of Francis Brinkley’s Japan from the 1890s. The transition of travel photography from collector’s item to commercial commodity profoundly influenced foreigners’ understanding of exotic and alien cultures—and the Web now makes it possible to reassemble these images and give them new life and meaning. Units: Felice Beato’s Japan: Places, Globetrotters’ Japan: Places, Globetrotters’ Japan: People Museum of Fine Arts, Boston http://www.mfa.org The extensive Asian art collection of the Boston MFA has been a major resource for several VC units. The Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection of Japanese woodblock prints is the basic source for the three-part “Throwing Off Asia” unit—providing a stunning view of Westernization in late-19th-century Japan, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Many of the Sharf prints were digitized for the first time for use in VC units. The extraordinary Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards was the source of foreign as well as Japanese graphics used in two units on the Russo-Japanese war—opening up an entirely new window for understanding popular global perceptions and emotions during Japan’s emergence as a major military power. Units: Throwing Off Asia I, II, III; Asia Rising; Yellow Promise/Yellow Peril Peabody Essex Museum http://pem.org/homepage/index.php One of the premier American museums for Asian export art, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, contributed images depicting the early China trade based on paintings and artifacts in its outstanding collection. Units: The Rise & Fall of the Canton Trade System (in development) Ryosenji Treasure Museum http://www.izu.co.jp/~ryosenji/eigo.html This little gem of a museum, affiliated with the Ryosenji Temple in Shimoda (one of the two Japanese ports opened for use by Commodore Perry in 1854), houses a fine collection of popular graphics that illuminate the strikingly diversified responses of the Japanese to this rude and ominous foreign intrusion. The generosity of Abbot Daiei Matsui in making his collection accessible was instrumental in launching VC’s pioneer first unit on Japan’s opening to the West. Units: Black Ships & Samurai Shiseido Corporation http://www.shiseido.co.jp/com Founded at the very beginning of the 20th century, the history of the Shiseido cosmetics firm amounts to a small mirror on the history of modernity in Japan—reflecting changing ideals of feminine beauty, the emergence of a vibrant consumer culture, cutting-edge trends in packaging and advertising art, and the persistence of cosmopolitan ideals even in the midst of the dark valley of war and oppression. Shiseido has opened its huge and exceptionally rich archives to VC as it moves on to bring a scholarly lens to popular culture in the 20th century. Units: Selling Shiseido I, II, III Smith College Museum of Art http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/index.htm A pristine 50-print photo album from the Smith College of Art collection featuring views of Japanese people by Felice Beato provided VC with the basis for showing the birth of commercial photography of Japan for the tourist trade. Beato’s famous images set a pattern for what foreigners saw (and failed to see) in Japan for decades to come. Units: Felice Beato’s Japan: People Additional Contributing Institutions Allentown Art Museum Bard Graduate Center Chicago Historical Society Chrysler Museum of Art George Eastman House Harvard University Honolulu Bishop Museum Kobe City Museum Library of Congress Nagasaki Municipal Museum Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum New Bedford Whaling Museum Shimura Toyoshiro collection Shiryo Hensanjo, University of Tokyo Smithsonian Institution Smithsonian Institution Division of Photographic Resources Tokyo National Museum US Naval Academy Museum US Naval Historical Center White House Historical Association Yokohama Archives of History Yokohama Museum of Art |
