Shima Tamami

Shima Tamami (島珠実, 1937–1999) was a Japanese sōsaku-hanga (creative print) artist whose brief but productive career between 1958 and the mid-1960s established her as one of the most distinctive women printmakers of the postwar Shōwa generation. Her recorded output ran to fewer than seventy prints, but she gained early international recognition through inclusion in James A. Michener's landmark 1962 portfolio The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation, and her work entered major museum collections during the years when American and European institutions were actively building holdings of contemporary Japanese printmaking.

She was born on August 11, 1937 in Hirosaki, Aomori Prefecture, in the snow-belt of northern Honshū. After secondary school she moved to Tokyo and enrolled at the Women's College of Fine Arts (Joshi Bijutsu Daigaku, today Joshibi University of Art and Design), graduating in 1958. That institution had been founded in 1900 to give women access to the kind of academic art training that the Tokyo School of Fine Arts then reserved for men, and by the late 1950s its graduates were entering the modern hanga community in growing numbers. In 1959 Shima joined the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai (Women's Print Association), a pioneering all-female society founded in 1956 to address the marginal position of women within the larger Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association). Her work appeared at the group's fourth exhibition, held in the gallery of the Tōyoko Department Store in Shibuya, and she continued to exhibit with the association during its most active years, which ran until the mid-1960s.

From the outset Shima committed herself to the jiga-jikoku-jizuri (self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed) principle that defined sōsaku-hanga, in which the artist personally designs, carves, and prints each work rather than dividing the labor across specialist publishers, carvers, and printers as in the ukiyo-e workshop tradition. Her chosen subjects were modest and recurring: birds at rest or in flight, horses among trees, cropped landscapes with bell towers and castles, and still lifes built around fish, eggplant, lemons, fruit, and pottery. Within those subjects her formal vocabulary was unusually rigorous. She consistently used bold, exaggerated woodgrain — letting the natural figure of the plank read as both texture and pattern — and built compositions out of large flat shapes, restrained color, and a careful negotiation between positive image and reserved paper. The result feels at once modernist and rooted in a long Japanese tradition of decorative woodblock surface.

Her career reached its turning point in 1962, when she received a travel grant from the College Women's Association of Japan and saw her prize-winning print Tori B (Birds B) selected for inclusion in The Modern Japanese Print: An Appreciation, the deluxe portfolio compiled by the American novelist and collector James A. Michener. Michener singled out her composition for particular praise, a notice that helped fix her name in the early literature on postwar Japanese printmaking. Issued in a limited edition of about 510 copies, the portfolio paired her sheet with original prints by nine other contemporary artists — among them Maki Haku, Iwami Reika, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, and Azechi Umetarō — and became one of the principal vehicles by which contemporary Japanese prints reached American collectors and museums in the early 1960s. Not long after, Shima married and relocated to the United States; her exhibition record in Japan thins from about 1963, and after roughly 1965 her output as a printmaker effectively ceases. The body of work on which her reputation rests was almost entirely produced between 1958 and 1962, with a smaller cluster of pieces dated to about 1963–1964. She died in 1999.

For an artist whose active career lasted less than a decade, Shima is remarkably well represented in museum collections, in part because the Joryū Hanga Kyōkai years coincided with focused institutional collecting of contemporary Japanese prints. Her work is held at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the British Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Elvehjem (now Chazen) Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions. Her name appears in the standard reference literature on modern Japanese prints, including Helen Merritt and Nanako Yamada's Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints, and dealer specialists in postwar sōsaku-hanga regard her output as one of the more sought-after corners of the women's print movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She remains a rigorously trained artist whose mature voice was just emerging when her career stopped, leaving a small, coherent body of woodblock prints in which bird, horse, tree, and still-life motifs are filtered through a modern handling of woodgrain and flat color.