Last month, on Friday the 30th, children from three elementary schools in Karuizawa Town (West, Central, and East) came to see the exhibition. This time, 3 courses were held under the initiative of the Karuizawa Town Board of Education with the cooperation of Karuizawa facilities, and the target audience was about 24 elementary school students in the fifth and sixth grades in the town. Among the many courses, the children who wanted to take a tour of the art museum gathered.
Six of the 18 children who participated had previously visited our museum for workshops and other events.
There were also a few children for whom this was their first time in a museum.
However, the children were more mature than I expected, and listened to the lecture by the curator with wide eyes and a lively sense of curiosity.
I was listening intently.
This is the story of how humanity was astonished by the sight of the Earth like a blue jewel floating in the pitch black darkness, photographed during the Apollo 11 moon landing, which sparked awareness of environmental conservation on a global scale.
It is only since the Meiji period that landscape paintings have become based on actual landscapes, and Japan is particularly good at depicting its own unique view of the universe and the world through bonsai, bonsai stones, hanging scrolls, and ukiyo-e.The development of modern capsule toys, manga, and plastic models is said to be connected to this background.
The talk will include Miyasaka Ryosaku's land art using plant letters that use nature, and the environmental art of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
The children showed great interest in each of them, and as expected, many were fascinated by Daisy's work "ancient aquarium," which featured a swimming coelacanth recreated using computer paintings and cutting-edge technology, but Eames's "Powers of Ten" (1977) seemed to attract the attention of children who were interested in space.
It is not possible to see all the works in 45 minutes, so I tried to briefly summarize the highlights, but the children asked questions about things that I could not fully explain, and I was impressed by the children's high sensitivity and rich imagination.
At the end, they wrote their impressions on the paper they had prepared and handed it to us.
Some of the comments were very honest, such as, "I want to be a painter, so it was fun to see so many different works," "I wanted to jump into the coelacanth work," "I love space, so I thought the Powers of Ten was the best," and "I found the whipped cream and toilet works interesting," and I felt that I was able to truly convey the "charm of art." I would be happy if this experience sparks an interest in art in some of them.
Although this is the first year of the Karuizawa Seminar, the results have been impressive and I have heard that it is planned to continue next year as well.
This would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Karuizawa Town Board of Education and the teachers at Karuizawa Higashibu, Chubu, and Nishibu elementary schools.
I'm really thankful to you!
Exhibition informationCLICK HERE.から