Fukushima Museum of Art

The title suggests a print associated with the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, which holds significant collections of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking and has organized exhibitions of sosaku-hanga artists. Sekino maintained longstanding institutional relationships across the Tohoku region of his birth, and produced commemorative or commissioned prints for museums and other public bodies during the latter part of his career. Such commissions typically depicted the institution's building or grounds in his characteristic mature manner: broad planes of muted color, decisive outline carved with the chisel against the cherrywood block, and bokashi gradations applied with the baren to model architectural mass against sky. The image is printed on washi using water-based pigments, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga principle that the artist personally executes every stage of production. Within Sekino's wider output, prints of this kind sit alongside his Tokaido series, his Tohoku landscapes, and his portrait work as a record of his engagement with public institutions and contemporary Japanese cultural life.