Birds, Diplomacy, and Painting in 16th-century Japan

In celebration of Asia Week New York 2025, the Japanese Art Society of America is delighted to invite you to join JASA Members for the 2025 Annual Meeting and a special lecture presented by Matthew McKelway, Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University. Highlighting works included in Japan Society Gallery’s spring 2025 exhibition, Kotobuki: Auspicious Celebrations of Japanese Art from New York Private Collections, the lecture will explore the theme of bird-and-flower painting from the perspectives of East Asian diplomacy and commerce during the century of Japan’s first encounters with Europe and the New World.

This event is free for members with registration. Admission to the exhibition will be included with all ticket purchases.

About the speaker:

Matthew McKelway is Takeo and Itsuko Atsumi Professor of Japanese Art History, Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University. He specializes in the history of Japanese painting. His studies initially focused on urban representation in screen paintings of Kyoto (rakuchū rakugai zu) and the development of genre painting in early modern Japan, but have extended to Kano school painting, Rimpa, and individualist painters in 18th-century Kyoto. Some of these interests have converged in his essays on fan paintings, a subject of ongoing research. In his publications he has sought to understand Japanese paintings according to the physical and cultural contexts of their creators in order to discover the motivations, whether political, personal, literary, or philosophical, that drove them to make pictures in particular ways. He has been a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, University of Heidelberg, Seijō University, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2017 he was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

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Image: Hasegawa Tōhaku (Nobuharu), Flowers and Birds of Spring and Summer (detail), Momoyama Period (1573-1615), 1580s. Six-panel folding screen; ink, color, and gold on gilded paper. Private Collection, New York

Kotobuki: Auspicious Celebrations of Japanese Art from New York Private Collections is supported by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Japan Society’s 120th anniversary initiatives and related programs are generously supported by Champion Sponsor, MUFG Bank, Ltd.

Japan Society programs are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Exhibitions and Arts & Culture Lecture Programs are made possible, in part, by Sompo Holdings, Inc.; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Endowment Fund; the Mary Griggs Burke Endowment Fund established by the Mary Livingston Griggs and Mary Griggs Burke Foundation; The Masako Mera and Koichi Mera, PhD Fund for Education and the Arts; Yasko Tashiro and Thierry Porté; Peggy and Dick Danziger; Rosemarie Longhi, a gift in memory of Leighton Longhi; Jun Makihara and Megumi Oka; Barbara Bertozzi Castelli; Joan B. Mirviss; Gallery Circle members; and the International Gallery Advisory Committee. Support for Arts & Culture Lecture Programs is provided, in part, by the Sandy Heck Lecture Fund.

Transportation assistance is provided by Japan Airlines, the official Japanese airline sponsor for Japan Society gallery exhibitions.