EXHIBITION | May 24, 2022 – June 30, 2023
PROGRAM 11/16| Reception and Book Release, Wednesday, November 16, 2022, 4:00–6:00 p.m. (Museum)
BOOK LINK| WSU Press, Book are available for signing by the artist Wednesday, 11/16, 4:00–6:00 p.m. (Museum)
BOOK NOTIFICATION| Sign me up! Sign up to be notified when the books are available for sale
ARTWORK REFRESH| Gallery will be refreshed with new paintings and prints, reopening on January 17, 2023.
ABOUT | Keiko Hara’s exploration of her relationship to her surrounding environment has been continually formulated through the artist’s ongoing series titled, Topophilia. Meaning “a strong love of place,” the term topophilia, with its connection to humanistic geography, also represents a universal desire to hold onto ephemeral moments of beauty and sadness as related to conceptions of place—even if unattainable. This mini-survey exhibition chronicles Hara’s unwavering commitment to painting and her unique form of Japanese woodblock printmaking, over a 40-year period. Her abstract compositions are at once immensely sensitive yet executed in vibrant color with references to water, fire, skies, and verdant lands, offering rich metaphorical imagery. Hara’s longtime home in Walla Walla, Washington, situated in an expansive valley flanked by the Blue Mountains, figures centrally within her work as does a more internal investigation into the poetics of space. Tactility of things, their reference to nature, and how we perceive, feel, and understand the universe that we inhabit are all conditions of Hara’s visual enterprise.
Hara was born in North Korea to Japanese parents, raised in Japan, and moved to the United States in 1971. She studied printmaking at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan earning an MFA in 1976. Hara taught for many years at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, retiring in 2006. With numerous one-person exhibitions to her credit since 1976, Hara has also been included in invitational group exhibitions throughout the United States. Among museums that include Hara’s work in their permanent collections are the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Racine Art Museum, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU and curated by Ryan Hardesty. Funding is provided by Ainslie and Keith Peoples, the Samuel H. and Patricia W. Smith Endowment, Nancy Spitzer, the Walla Walla Foundry, and members of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU.
LOCATION | The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art WSU is located in the Crimson Cube (on Wilson Road across from Martin Stadium and the CUB) on the WSU Pullman campus. For more information please visit museum.wsu.edu/about.
