Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection Symposium at NOMA

In celebration of the opening of the exhibition Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection, NOMA is pleased to present this day of talks by leading scholars of Japanese art in the Lapis Center for the Arts.

$15 for members, $25 general admission. Free admission for students with ID and all attendees ages 19 and under

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Please note: Registration includes breakfast and coffee at Café NOMA, but does not include lunch. You can view Café NOMA’s lunch menu here.

Event Schedule

9:00 – 9:45 AM | Registration, coffee, and light breakfast in Café NOMA

9:45 AM | Welcome

10:00 – 11:15 AM | Presentations

11:15 -11:30 AM | Coffee Break

11:30 AM – 12:30 PM | Presentations

12:30 – 1 PM | Panel Discussion

1:00 – 2:00 PM | Lunch Break in Café NOMA (view the lunch menu here)

2:00 – 4:45 PM | Time in the exhibition Second Nature (first floor, Ella West Freeman Gallery) and the Kurt A. Gitter, MD and Alice Yelen Gitter Gallery for Japanese Art (third floor)

About the Panelists

Yukio Lippit

Yukio Lippit is the Jeffrey T. Chambers and Andrea Okamura Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He is the author of many books and articles on Japanese and East Asian art, including the prize-winning Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2012) and Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Itō Jakuchū (National Gallery of Art, 2012), and most recently Ten Kings of Hell: The Afterlife in Medieval Korea (with Sooa Im McCormick, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2026) and “The Shōsōin Imperial Treasury: Three Perspectives” (Archives of Asian Art, 2026). Lippit has taught at the Universities of Tokyo, Heidelberg, Los Andes, Campinas, and Melbourne. From 2013 to 2018, he served as the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, and in 2018 was appointed Harvard College Professor for distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching.

John T. Carpenter

John T. Carpenter, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese Art, has been at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, since 2011. For a dozen years before then, he taught the history of Japanese art at SOAS, University of London, and served as head of the London office of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures. He has published widely on Japanese art, especially in the areas of calligraphy, painting, and woodblock prints, and served as the editor of Hokusai and His Age: Ukiyo-e Painting, Printmaking, and Book Illustration in Late Edo Japan (2005) and Reading Surimono: The Interplay of Text and Image in Japanese Prints (2008). Since arriving at The Met he has overseen numerous exhibitions and helped write and edit the accompanying catalogues, including: Designing Nature: The Rinpa Aesthetic in Japanese Art (2012); The Poetry of Nature: Edo Paintings from the Fishbein-Bender Collection (2018; Chinese edition 2021); The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illuminated (2019) and, most recently, The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy and Painting; The Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection (2025).

Frank Feltens

Frank Feltens is the Susan Brotman Chief Curator at the Seattle Art Museum. He was previously Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Japanese Art at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. He holds a PhD in Japanese art history from Columbia University and has organized exhibitions on traditional, modern, and contemporary, most recently Into the Waters with Senju and Bingyi: Two Contemporary Paintings at the Smithsonian and Shin-Hanga: From Kiyochika to Hasui at the Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Tokyo. He has published numerous books, among them Ogata Kōrin: Art in Early Modern Japan.

Tomoko Sakomura

Tomoko Sakomura is Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College whose work explores the relationships between text and image in Japanese art and design, including a new project on calligraphy and handwriting. Her book Poetry as Image: The Visual Culture of Waka in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Leiden: Brill, 2016) examined visual representations of Japanese classical court poetry and how they promoted the courtly present as elegant instruments of elite self-representation. Sakomura holds a PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University.

About the Exhibition

Second Nature: Japanese Rinpa Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection includes prominent early artists of the Rinpa lineage such as Hon’ami Kōetsu (1558-1637), Tawaraya Sōtatsu (ca. 1600-1640), and Ogata Kōrin (1658-1716), all of whom were active in Kyoto. It is distinguished, however, by its focus on later Rinpa painters, such as Nakamura Hōchū (d. 1819), Sakai Hōitsu (1767-1828), and Suzuki Kiitsu (1796-1858). These latter painters were active in Osaka and Edo and took the school in new artistic directions.

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