When the Cosmos Bloom: Educational Printmaking as Convivial Arts

“When the Cosmos Bloom” is a project exhibition that explores “educational print making as convivial arts”—printmaking within the context of primary and lower secondary education. This project recenters and reiterates the way children learn to coexist with others, while simultaneously reflecting how art can influence and shape contemporary society.
Drawing from the post-war educational printmaking movement led by OtaTA Koshi (Printmaker, Educator), his and his peers’ work from the pre-war period, as well as from the Suminuri Kyokasho where textbooks were blackened out with sumi ink in the aftermath of the Second World War, this project began as a way to look towards peace. Focusing on educational printmaking materials from the 1950s to the 1990s specific to the prefecture and held in the Goshogawara City Board of Education Repository, the exhibit will be demonstrateing the reprinting process for “Agricultural History in Shariki,” a picture scroll that spans thirty meters in length, displayed alongside woodblock prints created as acts of resistance by the A3BC Anti-War, Anti-Nuclear and Arts of Block-print Collective, creating a space where children beyond borders freely engage with printmaking. It is within this very space that empathy, attentiveness towards one’s local community, and the wish for peace will hopefully take root and resonate.
Even now, 80 years after the war, the world remains scorched by its flames; society and all its contradictions have grown increasingly severe, and the misuse of technology continues to ravage the earth. It is precisely because of this that we today must nurture our hands and our eyes to actively advocate for peace–the flower language of the cosmos. Advocate for learning, advocate for printmaking! Just asLike the children of the past and the children of today, we too, must grow. Through the works of these children, the hope remains that a cosmos will blossom in the heart of one more person.