Reiko Tomii (富井 玲子, Tomii Reiko) is a Japanese-born art historian and curator based in New York.[1] Specializing in Japanese modern and conceptual art in its global context during the postwar period, Tomii is one of the art historians publishing in the English language on postwar Japanese art.[2] Tomii helped organize the first North American retrospective on the work of
Yayoi Kusama (1989), and collaborated closely[1][2][3] with curator
Alexandra Munroe to produce the seminal[4][5][6] exhibition and book Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994). In 2017, Tomii's book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan was awarded the
Robert Motherwell Book Award by the Dedalus Foundation.[7] Tomii is also co-founder and co-director of the postwar Japanese art research collective PoNJA-GenKon (Post-1945 Japanese Art Discussion Group-Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai).[8]
Early life and education
Reiko Tomii was born and raised in
Osaka,
Japan.[2] Raised by two pharmacist parents who pushed her to study math, Tomii received a B.S. degree in Math from
Osaka University in 1979.[2] Dissatisfied with this career path, she retook her junior and senior years and earned a second B.A. degree in Art History from the same university in 1982, followed by an M.A. degree in Art History in 1984.[2] In 1988, she received her PhD in Art History from the
University of Texas at Austin, working under the supervision of
John R. Clarke and writing a dissertation on
kinetic sculptorGeorge Rickey entitled Between Two Continents: George Rickey, Kinetic Art and Constructivism, 1949-1968.[9][1]
Career
Curation
In 1988, Tomii took a job as Head of Research at the now-defunct Center for International Contemporary Arts (CICA) in New York City, where she worked with curator
Alexandra Munroe to help curate the first retrospective exhibition in the United States on the works of
Yayoi Kusama.[2][1] Munroe has extensively praised Tomii's work on the exhibition, writing, "The biographical and bibliographic research compiled and translated by Reiko Tomii have created the foundation for all subsequent research on Kusama..."[10] The two curators continued their collaboration by developing the seminal 1994 exhibition Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945 at the
Guggenheim SoHo in New York.[1][2] Tomii would later go on to curate or co-curate numerous exhibitions on postwar art, including, among others, Global Conceptualism (Queens Museum of Art, 1999), Century City (Tate Modern, 2001), Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art (Getty Center, 2007), and Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s (Japan Society, 2019).[8][11][12]
Art historical research
Tomii has published articles on postwar Japanese art in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as well as contributing to exhibition catalogs. Tomii is especially known for her work on Japanese artists and art collectives in the 1960s and 1970s such as
Genpei Akasegawa,
Hi-Red Center,
Kazuo Shiraga,
Gutai, and
Mono-ha. In 2017, she published a single-authored scholarly monograph, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (The MIT Press, 2016), which used archival research to examine the work of three Japanese artists/collectives,
GUN,
the Play, and
Yutaka Matsuzawa, and show how their work intersected with that of international conceptual artists such as
Stanley Brouwn and
Yves Klein.[13] Tomii's book was awarded the prestigious
Robert Motherwell Book Award, which came with a $10,000 cash prize.[7] The prize selection committee praised the book as "impeccably researched and clearly written...offering a wealth of new insight and analysis on modernist art history of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s...thereby expanding and challenging the understanding of global modernisms."[7]
In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Reiko Tomii,
OCLC/
WorldCat encompasses roughly 90 works in 172 publications in 1 languages and 2,039 library holdings.[19]
Books
Tomii, Reiko (2016). Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan. The MIT Press.
ISBN978-0262034128.
Book chapters
Tomii, Reiko (2007). "After the 'Descent to the Everyday': Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964-1973". In Stimson, Blake; Sholette, Gregory (eds.). Collectivism After Modernism. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 44–75.
ISBN978-0816644629.
Scholarly articles
Tomii, Reiko (2002). "State v. (Anti-)Art: Model 1,000 Yen Note Incident by Akasegawa Genpei and Company". Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 10 (1): 141–172.
doi:
10.1215/10679847-10-1-141.
S2CID144997715.
Tomii, Reiko (2004). "Historicizing 'Contemporary Art': Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan". Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. 12 (3): 611–641.
doi:
10.1215/10679847-12-3-611.
S2CID144224880.
Tomii, Reiko (2009). "'International Contemporaneity' in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond". Japan Review (21): 123–147.
Tomii, Reiko (2013). "Six Contradictions of Mono-Ha". Review of Japanese Culture and Society. 25 (25): 214–222.
doi:
10.1353/roj.2013.0013.
S2CID170745914.
Tomii, Reiko (2019). "'A Test Tube' of New Art: Naiqua and the Rental Gallery System in 1960s Japan". Afterall Journal. 47 (1): 146–161.
Articles in exhibition catalogs
Tomii, Reiko (1999). "Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan". In Mariani, Philomena (ed.). Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s. Queens Museum of Art. pp. 14–29.
ISBN0-960-45149-8.
Tomii, Reiko (2007). "Geijutsu on Their Minds: Memorable Words on Anti-Art". In Merewether, Charles (ed.). Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970. Getty Research Institute. pp. 35–58.
ISBN978-0892368662.
Tomii, Reiko (2009). "Shiraga Paints: Toward a 'Concrete' Discussion". In Tomii, Reiko; McCaffrey, Fergus (eds.). Kazuo Shiraga: Six Decades. McCaffrey Fine Art. pp. 9–30.
ISBN978-0979048449.
Tomii, Reiko (2013). "An Experiment in Collectivism: Gutai's Prewar Origin and Postwar Evolution". In Tiampo, Ming; Munroe, Alexandra (eds.). Gutai: Splendid Playground. Guggenheim Museum. pp. 248–253.
ISBN978-0892074891.
^Gardner, William O. (Spring 2008). "Review of Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-Garde Rejection of Modernism". Monumenta Nipponica. 63 (1): 205.
doi:
10.1353/mni.0.0015.
S2CID191464980.
^Schwartz, Alexandra (2015). Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s. University of California Press. p. 204.
ISBN978-0520282889.