“I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low,” pronounced Ralph Waldo Emerson in The American Scholar. Emerson’s celebrated lecture dates back to 1837 but expresses a decidedly modern sentiment: Mundane objects of workaday life can be both beautiful and revealing of a nation’s character.
“Japanese Design Today 100” finds insight in 100 objects of everyday use in Japan. Including furniture, stationary, tableware, cookware, apparel and accessories, the carefully selected objects typify different design trends and Japanese visual culture more generally. Eighty-nine of the objects were made within the past five years, while the remaining 11 are products of post-war Japanese design.
“Japanese Design Today 100” is displayed in Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design’s Brooks Stevens Gallery Oct. 30-Feb. 6, 2016. During the 6 p.m. opening reception on Friday, Oct. 30, the exhibition’s design director, Shu Hagiwara, will give a presentation.
“Photography and the Scientific Spirit”
John Michael Kohler Arts Center
5634 Evergreen Drive
The invention of photography in the 19th century was as exciting for scientists as it was artists. The medium promised an objective record of natural phenomena, which, theretofore, had to be two dimensionally preserved in imprecise drawings. “Photography and the Scientific Spirit,” opening Friday, Oct. 30 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, presents photographs from 17 artists who explore the relationship between science and photography. A major influence on the 16 contemporary co-exhibited photographers, the pioneering work of Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) is at the center of the exhibition and the beginning of the movement.
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“Larry Sultan: Here and Home”
Chai Point Senior Living
1414 N. Prospect Ave.
“Larry Sultan: Here and Home” is newly on display at the Milwaukee Art Museum. The first retrospective of the celebrated California photographer presents more than 200 photographs, which represent six major bodies of work dating from the 1970s to the 2000s. To introduce and contextualize such a major exhibition, Suzi Hanks, docent educator at Milwaukee Art Museum, will discuss Sultan’s abiding fascination with the themes of family, home and façade. The talk is free, open to the public and takes place at Chai Point Senior Living at 3 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 29.
