Above image: Kei Ito, Eye Who Witnessed, 2020–21 (detail)

Opening Reception

Artist panel and opening reception, Thursday, January 15, 5:00–8:00 p.m.

Join us at 5:00 p.m. in West Wilson Hall, Rm 124, for the artist panel

“Past Is Present: Memorializing the Hibakusha Experience”

Featuring Kei Ito, Katy McCormick, Migiwa Orimo, and elin o’Hara slavick.

Panel to be followed by reception and exhibition opening, OUAG, 6:30–8:00 p.m.

Event made possible by the generous support of The Judd Family Endowed Fund and the Barry M. Klein Center for Culture and Globalization

Featuring

The Wilmington College Peace Resource Center

Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection

Including historical works by Japanese artists Domon Ken, Dosho Taro, Fukuda Sumako, Fukushima Kikujirō, Itō Takeshi, Iwamiya Takeji, Kimura Gon’ichi, Kita Kazuaki, Kurosaki Haruo, Matsuda Hiroshi, Matsushige Yoshito, Murasato Sakae, Nagata (Atsushi) Tōzō, Onuka Masami, Sasaki Yuichiro, Tōmatsu Shōmei, and Yamahata Yosuke.

Also featuring thought-provoking contemporary artworks by Kei Ito, Myong Hee Kim, Katy McCormick, Migiwa Orimo, and elin o’Hara slavick.

Created in partnership with the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College, Ohio, Memorializing the Hibakusha Experience features the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection, the brainchild of Quaker nuclear abolitionist Barbara L. Reynolds (1915–1990), who settled in Hiroshima throughout the 1960s. Comprised of photographs, publications, artifacts, and other materials of Japanese origin—the likes of which has no parallel outside of Japan—this singular archive was assembled in support of Reynolds’s advocacy, which strove to eradicate nuclear arms by shining a light on the plight of the hibakusha (A-bombed survivors).

Harmonizing with the historical works, the exhibition also prominently features artworks by five contemporary artists, whose work retains the urge to memorialize the hibakusha experience. Each of these contemporary artists has devoted many years probing how to negotiate the fraught subject of the nuclear holocaust, while exemplifying how the past continues to shape the present.

Conceived to mark the 50^th anniversary of the Peace Resource Center established in 1975 and the 80^th commemoration of the A-bombing of Japan, this is the first showing of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Memorial Collection outside of its home institution.

Claude Baillargeon, Curator