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Join us for the 45th season of the Treasure Coast’s most celebrated arts and humanities lecture series. This lecture series is presented in conjunction with the exhibition 'Hokusai, Hiroshige, Hasui: Japanese Landscapes in Print'. The featured speakers will provide audiences with multiple perspectives to contextualize the exhibition’s themes.Patrons are invited to attend the lectures at the VBMA or stream them from the comfort of their homes.
Monday, November 30, 2026 at 4:30pm | Cross-Cultural Currents: Water in 19th-Century Japanese, French, and American Art
Noriko Murai, PhD, Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan
From Hokusai’s churning 'Great Wave' to Monet’s serene 'Water Lilies' and Homer’s dramatic seascapes, water emerged as a defining motif of the modern era. In the late nineteenth century, the rise of steamships suddenly connected distant worlds at unprecedented speeds, launching a new age of global travel between hubs like Yokohama, London, and New York. In this lecture, Dr. Noriko Murai explores the ocean as both a literal highway for cross-cultural exchange and a profound artistic symbol, examining how nineteenth-century artists captured water’s volatile, ever-changing fluidity as a mirror for a rapidly shifting modern world.
Murai received her PhD from Harvard University and is Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo, where she teaches the history of modern art with a focus on Japan and Japonisme. Her research interests include cross-cultural exchanges, art historiography, and women’s participation in the arts. A bilingual scholar working in Japanese and English, her publications in English include Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (2009), Inventing Asia: American Perspectives Around 1900 (2014), Japan in the Heisei Era (1989–2019): Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2022), and Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture (2025).
Additional 2027 ILS Speakers:
Monday, January 11, 2027 at 4:30pm | Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: Behind the Scenes of a Celebrated Japanese Woodblock Print Series
Andreas Marks, PhD, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and Director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Monday, February 1, 2027 at 4:30pm | The World Within the Image
Pico Iyer, Best-selling Author, Journalist, and Travel Writer
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Event venue
3001 Riverside Park Dr, Vero Beach, FL, United States, Florida 32963
Tickets
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