China, Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), Celestial Horse (detail), bronze with traces of polychrome, gift of Ruth and Bruce Dayton, 2002.45
Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time
February 18, 2026 – August 30, 2026
Bell Family Decorative Arts Court (333)
Free Exhibition
Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time celebrates the enduring power, beauty, and symbolism of horses in Chinese art and culture. Across millennia, the horse has galloped through China’s imagination—as chariot puller, zodiac sign, loyal companion, and poetic metaphor.
This exhibition explores the horse as both a real creature and a cultural emblem—embodying strength, status, virtue, and aspiration. From ritual bronzes to scholar’s miniatures, imperial scrolls to popular expressions, the horse reveals a rich interplay of mythology, mobility, and meaning. As we welcome a new Year of the Horse, these timeless images invite reflection on what it means to move, strive, and endure.
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Kinryūzan Temple in Asakusa, 1856, 7th month. Utagawa Hiroshige, Japanese, 1797 – 1858; Sakanaya Eikichi, Publisher, Japanese. Edo period (1603–1868). Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Louis W. Hill, Jr.. P.75.51.381
Hiroshige’s 100 Views of Edo x Emily Allchurch
December 20, 2025 – August 23, 2026
Mary Griggs Burke Gallery of Japanese Art and Louis W. Hill Gallery (238 and 239)
Utagawa Hiroshige’s (1797–1858) iconic landscape series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” (modern-day Tokyo), first published in the 1850s, stands as one of the most celebrated collections of Japanese prints. Individual prints from this series of 118 are widely regarded as some of the finest achievements in Japanese art. Hiroshige captures locations in and around Edo during all four seasons, often from unique perspectives.
Inspired by Hiroshige’s compositions, British artist Emily Allchurch (born 1974) created “Tokyo Story” using digital collage and photography. Allchurch traveled to Tokyo in 2009 and visited places pictured by Hiroshige. While many places have changed radically and bear no resemblance to Hiroshige’s images, Allchurch photographed details of the urban landscapes she encountered through various angles and focuses.
Following Hiroshige’s compositional arrangements, dramatic cropping, and color gradations, Allchurch also manipulated details of the photographic data to create views that are at once familiar and strangely fresh. This exhibition connects the past and the present by featuring Hiroshige’s captivating sceneries along with Allchurch’s modern adaptations.
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And More by More They Dream Their Sleep: Mezzotints by Yōzō Hamaguchi Part II
August 2, 2025 – April 5, 2026
G226, 227
Yōzō Hamaguchi (1909–2000) was a master of color mezzotints, a technique that allowed printmakers to reproduce complex details of an artwork. Photography had rendered it obsolete by the 1900s, but Hamaguchi revived the technique after encountering it during a stay in Paris in the 1930s. There, he met American poet e.e. cummings, who gifted him a tool to achieve the signature tones in mezzotint. In the 1980s, Hamaguchi paid homage to the poet with the “e.e. cummings suite” of prints titled with lines from the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
This exhibition explores how Hamaguchi transformed the ordinary into the uncanny, featuring prints generously donated by Charles and Robyn Citrin and Bill and Roberta Stein.
This exhibition is presented in two parts:
Part I: November 27, 2024–July 20, 2025
Part II: August 2, 2025–April 5, 2026
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Painted Poetry: Art of the Rajput Courts
May 10, 2025 – May 10, 2026
Gallery 212
Rajput paintings evoke many moods and senses. They tell stories about the beliefs, desires, myths, poetry, and power that shaped the royal Rajput courts of northern India during the 16th to 19th centuries. Rajput artists chose subject matter that was meant to engage all of our senses (taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight) and elicit emotional responses—an aesthetic experience known as rasa. Love, laughter, fury, compassion, disgust, horror, heroism, wonder, and tranquility are the nine rasas of Indian aesthetics and offer one way to interpret Rajput paintings.
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Yoshida Chizuko, Japanese, 1924–2017, Jazz, 1954. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper. Gift of the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture; formerly given to the Center by H. Ed Robison, in memory of his beloved wife Ulrike Pietzner Robison. 2013.29.539
The Abstract Worlds of Yoshida Hodaka and Chizuko
September 20, 2025 – October 4, 2026
Galleries 251, 252, and 253
Yoshida Hodaka (1926–1995) was born into a family of artists. He was the second son of Yoshida Hiroshi (1876–1950), a leading Western-style artist in Japan during the early 20th century. Hodaka leaned toward abstraction and began exploring that path after his father’s death in 1950. In 1953, Hodaka married Chizuko (1924–2017), a trained painter. In addition to oil painting, both Hodaka and Chizuko worked in the woodblock print medium. In 1992, Hodaka created a set of six extraordinarily large prints that depict walls with great attention to structural features and surface details. This exhibition showcases the entire wall set together for the first time, along with Chizuko’s abstract works and playful groups of butterflies.
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Ink Rhythms on the Breeze: The Art of Chinese Fan Paintings
November 29, 2025 – November 8, 2026
Sit Gallery (203)
This exhibition explores the intimate world of Chinese fan painting—where poetry, calligraphy, and painted images converge in the palm of the hand. Featuring circular silk fans from the Song and Yuan dynasties (10th–14th centuries) and folding fans from the Ming and Qing period (14th–early 20th centuries), these works reflect centuries of refined aesthetic practice, personal expression, seasonal contemplation, and spiritual reflection.
Whether created by court artists or literati scholars, each fan carries the rhythm of the brush and the breeze: a fleeting moment captured in ink. Drawn from Mia’s rich collection, the selected fans invite viewers to experience how art, nature, and verse were held—literally and symbolically—in one’s grasp.
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