The Chicago Art Deco Society and the Caxton Club invite you to a presentation: Emulation or Inspiration? Japanese Design Books and Art Deco Teri J. Edelstein & Lisa Pevtzow

Join the Chicago Art Deco Society and the Caxton Club for a presentation by Teri J. Edelstein and Lisa Pevtzow.

Design books, Zuan-cho, were tools of Japan’s kimono trade centered in Kyoto. These textile pattern books began in the late 17th and 18th century with mainly naturalistic designs. By the end of the 19th century, printed by hand in color woodblock, their designs were often startling, experimental, aspirational, as well as traditional. A number of designs, even from the 1890s, look to our eyes as being Art Deco in style. They form, not only fascinating documents of the Japanese textile tradition, often with embedded symbolism, but a dynamic exemplar of Japan/Japonisme—demonstrating the influences and counterinfluences between Japan and the West.

Dr. Teri J. Edelstein, curator and museum consultant, is principal of Teri J. Edelstein Associates, Museum Strategies. She served as Deputy Director of The Art Institute of Chicago and previously as director of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. She has taught at several universities.

Lisa Pevtzow has been collecting Japanese design books and textiles for more than than 20 years. Her books have been digitized by Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, as part of an effort to create a digital archive of Japanese cultural materials in museums and private collections in the United States and Europe. Some of her books and textiles will be on view in the current exhibit “Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan” at the Smart Museum.