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Exhibition Overview

"Museum of Mom’s Art" is an exhibition in which guest curators, Association “crazy about SHITAMACHI-RETRO” and TSUZUKI Kyoichi, present more than 1,000 works of “Mom’s Art,” handcraft works of varying sizes created by mothers, which is an art form that has been quietly attracting attention since the early 2000s. The Mom’s Art that TSUZUKI Kyoichi has continued to seek out can be found scattered throughout Japan, at store fronts of shopping arcades, community halls, and michinoeki roadside stations. One distinctive feature of Mom’s Art, which is created by moms all over Japan, is that, despite the ingenuity and differences in materials and style of each individual piece, there is somehow a commonality about them. This exhibition presents a re-thinking of Mom’s Art from Tsuzuki’s humorous perspective. There will also be a special exhibit of three artists specially selected by Tsuzuki, titled “Lone Stars of the Mom Universe.” By encountering the appeal of Mom’s Art from various angles, this exhibition will home in on the times and places of creatives who have no association with specialized art education, their expression, and their charm. There may even be an exquisite work of Mom’s Art lying dormant in your own home or town.

Title	Museum of Mom's Art
Period	Saturday, 22 January – Sunday, 10 April 2022
Opening Hours	11:00 - 19:00
Closed	Mondays (except 21 March) and 22 March
Venue	Tokyo Shibuya Koen-dori Gallery, Galleries 1 and 2 and Interactive Space
Admission	Free
Curator	TSUZUKI Kyoichi + Association “crazy about SHITAMACHI-RETRO”
Artists	ITO Yuki, OKU Machiko, OMOTO Setsuko, KIGOSHI Teiko, KUBOYAMA Midori, KEITANI Michiyo, KOUSAKA Shitomi, GOTO Chieko, SATO Ie, TAKAKUWA Yoshikazu, NII Mitsuko, NISHIMURA Midori, FUJII Takako, FUJIOKA Junko, MATSUDA Tazuko, MORI Toshiko, YAMADA Fumie, etc
Exhibition Space Design	YAMASHITA Kaori (atelier situationniste/Association “crazy about SHITAMACHI-RETRO”)
Organized by	Tokyo Shibuya Koen-dori Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture

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English translations of the texts in the exhibition's small catalog can be found at the following links.

Curator interview
(TSUZUKI Kyoichi)　　Curator interview
(YAMASHITA Kaori)　　 Essay
(OUCHI Kaoru)　　Essay
(KAWAHARA Koya)

Curator's statement

Moms never throw anything away. String from parcels is wound into a ball and kept in a drawer. Rubber bands are hooked over the faucet. Paper bags from the department store are tucked into the space beside the fridge. For the time being. Then, one day, there comes a sudden spark of inspiration. “If  I do this with this, this is the pretty thing I get!” And that is how Mom’s Art was born (probably).

Mom’s Art is, as the words suggest, “art made by Moms.” If Art Brut, or Outsider Art, is considered as existing to the “extreme north” of mainstream fine art, then Mom’s Art lies at the complete opposite extreme, a gently cultivated art form at the “extreme south.” Baffling the viewer, destroying stylish spaces with a single blow, overflowing with power and heat, Mom’s Art has a unique destructive force that, of course, does not exist in professional art, nor even in Outsider Art or Art Brut, which nowadays are starting to enter the “insider” realm. If the defining feature of contemporary art is its inability to be confined into a single value, then Mom’s Art may appear to be the most harmless of art forms but is actually the most dangerous.

TSUZUKI Kyoichi

Curator's profile

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