Art Institute of Chicago

Yoshiko Yamamoto's print titled simply Art Institute of Chicago belongs to the contemporary mokuhanga tradition that has flourished outside of Japan since the late twentieth century. Born in Tokyo and now based in the Pacific Northwest, Yamamoto is among the most visible practitioners of American mokuhanga, the term used today for Japanese-style woodblock printmaking carried on by artists working in the United States. Through her studio, The Arts and Crafts Press, she has spent more than two decades carving and printing limited-edition images that translate the precision of traditional hanga into a vocabulary shaped by the American Arts and Crafts movement, the writings of William Morris, and the regional architecture of California and the Pacific Coast.

This composition turns its attention to one of the great American civic buildings of the late nineteenth century, the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum's Beaux-Arts facade, designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge and completed in 1893 for the World's Columbian Exposition, is recognizable for its symmetrical bays, arched central entry, and the pair of bronze lions installed on the steps the following year. Yamamoto's print compresses this familiar elevation into a flat, decorative arrangement, using broad areas of color, firm key lines, and tightly registered blocks in the manner that contemporary mokuhanga has inherited from sosaku-hanga and shin-hanga predecessors.

The image is recorded in the ukiyo-e.org index of woodblock prints, which catalogs the work under the artist's name and provides the title used here; the print is not currently held in a major museum collection identified through standard catalogs. As with much of Yamamoto's output, the subject sits in a small but growing body of American mokuhanga that documents specific places, gardens, and landmarks in the visual language of Japanese woodblock printing, extending a centuries-old craft to new geographies while remaining technically faithful to the hand-carved, water-based-ink methods that define hanga as a medium.