Eric Conrad

Eric Conrad is a Canadian-born, Kansas-based artist and educator who works with the traditional Japanese technique of mokuhanga, or water-based woodblock printing. Working in the United States, he has contributed to international exhibitions that showcase the growing global community of mokuhanga practitioners.

Conrad's work was shown in the Americas section of the international juried exhibition at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen, Japan. The IMC is the primary international gathering for water-based woodblock printmakers, conceived in 2011 as a roughly triennial conference and held in a series of host cities in Japan and, more recently, abroad. The 2024 conference in Echizen was the fifth in the series, drawing hundreds of participants from many countries for exhibitions, workshops, demonstrations, and presentations.

Echizen, in Fukui Prefecture, was a particularly meaningful choice of venue for the 2024 conference. The region has been a center of washi papermaking for well over a thousand years and continues to produce some of Japan's finest handmade papers. For mokuhanga practitioners, whose art depends fundamentally on the quality of the paper they print on, the conference's location in a living papermaking community provided a direct connection to the source of one of their essential materials.

The Americas section presented work from across North and South America, reflecting the substantial growth of mokuhanga practice in the Western Hemisphere since the first IMC in 2011. Practitioners have been drawn to the technique for a range of reasons: the environmental sustainability of water-based printing compared to solvent-heavy Western methods, the distinctive qualities of translucent water-based pigments on handmade washi paper, and the meditative discipline of a process that requires constant attention to material conditions.

Conrad's practice connects him to a community of North American mokuhanga artists that has developed its own infrastructure of workshops, study groups, material suppliers, and exhibition opportunities. This community maintains strong ties to Japan through residency programs, teaching exchanges, and the roughly triennial IMC conferences, while also developing distinctly regional approaches to the medium that reflect the diverse artistic backgrounds and cultural contexts of its members.

Mokuhanga in the Americas has grown to the point where the region's works formed one of the largest groupings in the 2024 juried exhibition, second only to Europe, reflecting the critical mass of practitioners that has accumulated since the first conference in 2011 — a trajectory underscored by the decision to hold the sixth International Mokuhanga Conference in Lawrence, Kansas, in 2027. Artists like Conrad contribute to this growth through their sustained practice and their willingness to present work at the international level, helping to demonstrate that water-based woodblock printing has become a fully established medium within the North American printmaking landscape rather than a niche specialty or passing interest.