CORRECTION: The original story said the lecture was at 11 a.m. The lecture actually starts at 10 a.m.
Artists Don Kerr and Sharon Sandberg have spent most of their lives in Michigan. But roughly 15 years ago, their worldview changed on a whimsical visit to Japan. That trip turned into four more, as the duo kept traveling back as scholars with the Japan Center for Michigan Universities in Hikone. The two will talk about their experiences at a Kalamazoo Art League lecture on Wednesday, March 11th at 10 a.m. at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. WMUK's Robbie Feinberg talked with them about their experiences in Japan and how it affected their art.
FEINBERG: So, is there actually a connection between Western Michigan and Japanese art?
SHARON SANDBERG: Actually, we’re one of the oldest sister states with Shiga prefecture, Michigan is, because of the freshwater lakes. a lot of that has developed out of the Michigan Shiga relationship. So that actually was pretty destined, I guess.
FEINBERG: So tell me, a little bit, about how that interest in Japan and Japanese art first started? DON
KERR: Well, we were invited by a friend to join him for three weeks back in 1999. Of course, we were mostly interested in museums, and the artwork, which is very, very, very unusual. An entirely different atmosphere artistically than over here, both the architecture and the painting. Then we heard about the Japan Center for Michigan Universities and decided to apply for a semester there, and what we did while we there is offer a course that had to do with the arts. These are American students, mostly from Michigan, who come over there to study the Japanese language. And it’s a very tough school. And they like to include cultural material for our Michigan students while they’re there too. So we took on the job of teaching them about the temples, the Kano painting, the different kinds of art that exist, the Japanese prints. It meant a great deal of study on our part and exposure through books to Japanese periods through art history and notions of how the art is put together. It’s so different from what we see in Western Art in America. And what I would like to do is talk with the people in the museum in Kalamazoo and tell them what I learned over there, and how it’s affected my life, and particularly my appreciation for a new point of art.
SANDBERG: I’ve always had a studio there, so my research has tended to be studio-based, looking at the paintings and trying to increase my awareness and influence that it already had had on my art.
FEINBERG: How did it change your artwork once you started going over there? Did you see a visual change?
SANDBERG: I think I actually tried to have it affect me. I’m a still life painter, so the first, easy obvious choice is to select objects that are Japanese in nature and shape…I guess the biggest change is we came home after some point there and sold our Heritage Hill house and bought a house that looked more Japanese. Whether that was for good or ill, we did do that!...It was a revelation to see the architecture over there and realize that Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t come purely out of thin air. You feel like you’re seeing houses in Chicago in Hikone. And it’s that connection. And I think we walked into this particular house we’re in and the windows looked at to this view that we didn’t know existed around here. And it looked like a Japanese, Chinese landscape. And it was February, and the romantics we are, we jumped out of our Victorian house!
FEINBERG: So, obviously you’ve both been really affected by Japan. How are you going to condense that down for this talk?
SANDBERG: It is supposed to be about what we’ve gotten from our stays in Japan, and I’d say the most difficult thing is we’re trying to whittle that down right now, how to make some more brief, coherent description of our experience that makes sense in an encapsulated short time.
KERR: It is an art museum, too! And so we have to concentrate on art and leave out so many interesting things on our experiences there. So it is a tough thing to put all this together in a one hour talk.
