Variety of activities to share the value of cultural properties

The Keio University Art Center has various initiatives to introduce the university’s cultural properties to a broader range of students, faculty, and ordinary people—creating chances to bring them into contact with these properties. In this Step, we will go beyond workshops and tours and look at other approaches to utilization, such as exhibitions and performances using the Ex-Noguchi Room, and exhibiting furniture from inside the Ex-Noguchi Room in shows.

The furniture in the Ex-Noguchi Room has been exhibited in many shows. In 2006, there was a request from the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in New York to exhibit pieces in the show “Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi,” and a total of six pieces were loaned, including Benches (Small) and Round Stools. Since there was some scratching and dirtiness of the furniture, restoration was carried out before the loan to bring the pieces up to a safer and more aesthetically pleasing condition. (For more on restoration measures for Benches (Small), see Step 2.5.) In 2018, it was the 30th anniversary of the death of Isamu Noguchi, and there were many requests to exhibit in shows. From 2017 to 2018, we loaned the Coffee Table and four Round Stools to the exhibition “Isamu Noguchi: from sculpture to body and garden” which toured the Oita Prefectural Art Museum, the Kagawa Museum, and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. This was an opportunity for many people to see works of Isamu Noguchi from the Ex-Noguchi Room which is not ordinarily open to the public.

Other creative approaches have been tried in recent years. In 2016, we held a public event featuring the Ex-Noguchi Room called “Moved Rooms: The One-Mat Room and Shin Banraisha.” The event focused on issues like relocation and memory of buildings, and there were displays of works by modern artists and lectures by researchers, using the Ex-Noguchi Room as a venue.

In 2018, a dance performance was held in the Ex-Noguchi Room in coordination with the event “Introduction to Archives XVIII: Hijikata Tatsumi as Trickster / ‘Rebellion of the Body’ 1968-2018” of the Hijikata Archive of the Keio University Art Center. (If you are interested in Butoh or Hijikata, you will definitely want to take this course.) Furthermore, the Ex-Noguchi Room is used as a venue for dramatic readings, reading performances, and other modern art activities as part of the Theater Commons Project of the Cultural Project Program of Minato City.

^{「Display at the “Moved Rooms: The One-Mat Room and Shin Banraisha” event © Keio University Art Center} 　

References

• Yu Honma, Shinsuke Niikura, “Report 1, Opening Up University Architecture: A Moved Room and the Keio Architecture Promenade,” Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) “General Research on the Use of Art Resources at a University” 2016 Report, University Art Resource Research II, March 2017, pp. 95–98.