In Conversation with Yoshiko Wada - LongHouse Virtual Lecture Series
The Dyer's Art in Japan:  Homage to Jack Lenor Larsen

Sunday, February 28, 2021
4:30pm EST
$35/$25 members
Tickets - A link to this lecture recorded on February 28 will be emailed to you.

The seminal book The Dyer’s Art published in 1976 by Jack Larsen, Alfred Buhler, and Bronwen and Garret Solyom was a mind-shifting catalyst in textile studies, akin to Edward’s Said’s Orientalism published two years later, awakening Westerners to political and cultural realities of the world beyond the West. Larsen and Buhler brought attention to the resist-dyeing art of greater Asia, cultures around the Mediterranean Sea, Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. The remarkable extant textile examples from the 7th and 8th centuries Japan – Emperor Shōmu’s (701–765) treasures – have been housed and thus preserved in Shōsō-in at Tōdaiji Temple in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. Yoshiko will present colorful, less-familiar Japanese resist-dying traditions up to the current time, including kyokechi, itajime, katazome, shibori, and kasuri of the Imperial court, the Shogunate court, merchants, entertainers, and common folk.

Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada is an artist, curator, author and co-author of several books including The Kimono Inspiration: art and art to wear in America, Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped-Resist Dyeing, and Memory on Cloth: Shibori Now, is president of World Shibori Network and founder of Slow Fiber Studios. She has produced educational films including “Arimatsu Narumi Shibori: Celebrating 400 years of Japanese Artisan Design,” “Colors of the Americas: Natural dye workshop with wool using sustainable methods,” and a natural dye workshop film series. Her essay “What is Boro?” is published in an exhibition catalog of “BORO: Art of Necessity” opening in March, 2021, at the Eastern Antiquity Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

She has been a consultant to designers in the USA, India, and Japan including costume designer Colleen Atwood for the movie Memoirs of a Geisha and Christina Kim of Dosa Inc. Yoshiko has led LongHouse Reserve tours to Japan, India, China, and Mexico in art, architecture, and textile.

"In Conversation with Yoshiko Wada" is made possible through the generous support of Nicole Williams and Dr. Lawrence Becker, Jacqueline Brody, Adelaide de Menil, Regina Sender Levin and Madeline I. Noveck.