About the Project
This website is an open educational resource (OER) that presents Ainu and Ryūkyūan visual and textual primary source materials. Although many scholars we have encountered say they would like to engage with non-dominant cultures in their research and teaching, most do not feel that they have the training or time to do so responsibly. This site includes curated instruction lesson plans (Powerpoint templates, object images, primary source materials) for teaching Japanese Art History with Ainu and Ryūkyūan material culture. This site is primarily designed for museum and library professionals, faculty and instructors, and Ainu and Okinawan communities.
This project seeks to interrogate art historical notions of center (political elites, academic canons, traditional hierarchies, etc.) and periphery (cultural tokenism, non-normative materials and approaches, accusations of derivativeness, etc.). In the field of Japanese art, our textbooks, classroom instruction, and much of our research continues to reify old hierarchies of value (such as “fine arts” vs. “folk arts”) and a limited historical narrative, focused almost exclusively on the cultural production of the elites of the royal court, the various warrior regimes, powerful religious institutions, and wealthy merchants and others in Japanese history.
Goals
- Complicate the picture of Japanese art and more accurately describe the complex cultural interactions that have marked its history.
- Establish and maintain an ongoing dialogue between scholars, community members, and other stakeholders that continues to expand the study of the arts and material cultures of the Japanese archipelago.
- Create and maintain an open-access online educational resource that will promote study of marginalized communities, regions, and media that have generally been underrepresented in previous art historical scholarship.
Meet the Project Team
Dana Reijerkerk
Dana is the Project Co-Director and works as the Knowledge Management & Digital Assets Librarian at Stony Brook University. In her current role as digital asset manager, she implements digital preservation practices and advises on copyright, user experience design, and digital system architecture. She earned a B.A. in American Indian Studies and a Masters of Science in Information from the University of Michigan. She has years of experience working with federally and state-recognized Indigenous communities in the U.S., helping to further their cultural revitalization projects. She acts as webmaster for this project website.
Emily Cornish
Emily is the Graduate Student Research Assistant. Cornish is a doctoral candidate in the history of art department at the University of Michigan studying the visual culture of the Pacific Islands. She has a BA in art history and an MA in art history from Nazareth College, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has completed a Museum Studies certificate at the University of Michigan and has experience in the following roles: curatorial research assistant, curatorial intern, education and outreach coordinator. For this project she will provide research assistance in the areas of Indigenous art and visual culture, and decolonial practice within humanities projects.
Kevin Carr
Kevin Carr is the Project Director and is an associate professor of Japanese art in the History of Art department at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD at the Princeton University in 2005 and since then has taught undergraduate and graduate students in the United States and Japan. He is a specialist in premodern Japanese art, having written Plotting the Prince: Shōtoku Cults and the Mapping of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawai’i Press) in 2012, co-authored Hyecho’s Journey: The World of Buddhism (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), and co-edited the exhibition catalog Shinto: Discovery of the Divine in Japanese Art (The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2019). Hyecho’s Journey was a multi-year collaborative research project that produced a scholarly monograph, two apps, part of a major exhibition, and a website. He facilitates all aspects of the project, including research, content creation, and community engagement. He is committed to rethinking the practices and canons of art history through sustained engagement with Indigenous and other stakeholder communities.