Episode 560: Listen as I chat with Kristine Hardeberg, art historian, author, teacher, influencer about her latest book, Art History for Everyone. [Affiliate link alert] It makes art history relevant to the hoi polloi. I totally dig this!!
Episode 96: Today I chat with author, Gerry Kearney…all the way in Galway, Ireland! We talk about his new book, In the Days that Were, which will be available on Amazon shortly. Find out why the Persse family is so fascinating that two non-Persses have written about them.
Gerry was kind enough to speak with me even though he wasn’t feeling well.
Episode 39 : Barry Till, a curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (Canada), gives Brooke a history lesson on the Meiji (pronounced MAY-gee) period in Japan. During this tumultuous forty-five year span the island nation was transformed from a nineteenth-century insular feudal society into a twentieth-century global industrial and military power.
The Art Gallery is home to one of the most comprehensive collections of Japanese art in Canada. It is currently hosting Modernization in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) Changing Images of Architecture, Transportation and War. The exhibition features contemporaneous wood block prints which illustrate Japanese life during this period. The prints not only serve as works of accessible popular art, but also provide historical insight into those fascinating and influential times. The exhibition will continue until August 28, 2016.
Meiji woodblock prints are fascinating in that they reveal to us a country in total transition. During the short period of Emperor Meiji’s reign (1868-1912) of nearly 45 years, Japan made an astonishingly swift metamorphosis from a feudal state into a modern industrial nation and major military power. Meiji Japan was recognized as the great nation-building “success story” of the modern non-Western world. What had taken the Western powers centuries to accomplish, Japan achieved in a few short decades. The prints of the period clearly show how Japan enthusiastically threw itself into changing and modernizing the nation by adopting just about anything Western. It was truly amazing how every facet of life in Japan would experience an intense social and economic upheaval. This exhibition will focus on three main aspects of their modernization: architecture, transportation and wars. The Gallery has one of the largest and finest collections of Meiji prints in North America.
Featured Image (at top of page): City Scene with Horse-drawn Streetcars | Original Meiji era Japanese Woodblock Print