To celebrate the major gift of 28 works by Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko (1921-2021) to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, the museum will organize the exhibition Tomiyama Taeko: A Tale of Sea Wanderers. Drawing on a rich vocabulary of images and techniques, the artist has addressed issues around gender, imperialism, war responsibility, and environmental destruction through an unflinching feminist and activist lens throughout her career. Her subject for the last quarter-century has been Japan's colonial empire, its destructive wars in Asia, and the complicated emotional and social legacies left by both war and imperialism after 1945. This exhibition presents the series Hiruko and the Puppeteers: A Tale of Sea Wanderers consisting of oil paintings and collages produced in 2008 that depict a troupe of wandering minstrels, puppeteers, and musicians who travelled from the South Pacific to the waters of East Asia and beyond. Their stories range from ancient religious myth, to Japan's wartime colonial expansion, ultimately concluding in a cautionary tale of environmental catastrophe for our present day. This is the first exhibition of the Hiruko series in the United States, and the gift to the AD&A Museum will represent the largest holding of Tomiyama's work outside of Asia.

Tomiyama Taeko: A Tale of Sea Wanderers is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and is curated by Gabriel Ritter, AD&A Museum Director, with Hayate Murayama, Curatorial Research Fellow. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of the AD&A Museum Council and the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.

Image: Tomiyama Taeko, Wandering Minstrels and Puppeteers (2008), oil on canvas, 31 3/5 x 39 1/3 inches. Photo by Kobayashi Hiromichi.