Join Center Program Artist Mayumi Lake and Dr. Ayako Yoshimura (University of Chicago Japanese Studies Librarian) for a virtual conversation about the history, myth, and the symbolic importance of flower designs in Japanese textiles and kimonos.

Register Here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/virtual-talk-folklore-of-kimono-imaginary-flowers-tickets-260590622567

Mayumi Lake (b. Osaka, Japan) is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work delves into childhood and pubescent dreams, phobia and desires. She employs herself and others as her models, as well as dolls, toys, weapons, vintage clothes, and altered landscapes as her props.

Mayumi received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has published 2 monographs from Nazraeli Press. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Huston, Asia Society, Facebook, and more.

http://mayumilake.com/

Dr. Ayako Yoshimura is a folklorist (Ph.D. in folklore, University of Wisconsin–Madison) whose research interests include ethnography, autoethnography, personal experience narratives, vernacular beliefs, the supernatural, material culture (clothing, foodways, arts and crafts, design), and public folklore (cultural exchange, community outreach).
Her dissertation is entitled “An Autoethnography of Kin-aesthetics: Retrieving Family Folklore Through the Wearing of Used Kimonos” (2015), and she offers university lectures and public talks on kimono culture while continuing research that focuses on wearers’ perspectives. Ayako Yoshimura is the Japanese Studies Librarian at the University of Chicago Library.

https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/about/directory/staff/ayako-yoshimura/