Reiko Tomii

is a Japanese-born art historian and curator based in New York. Specializing in Japanese modern and conceptual art in its global context during the postwar period, Tomii is one of the leading art historians publishing in the English language on postwar Japanese art. Tomii helped organize the first North American retrospective on the work of Yayoi Kusama, and collaborated closely with curator Alexandra Munroe to produce the seminal exhibition and book Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994). In 2017, Tomii's book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Award by the Dedalus Foundation.

Early life and education

Reiko Tomii was born and raised in Osaka, Japan. The two curators continued their collaboration by developing the seminal 1994 exhibition Scream Against the Sky: Japanese Art after 1945 at the Guggenheim SoHo in New York.

Art historical research

Tomii has published articles on postwar Japanese art in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as well as contributing to exhibition catalogs. Tomii is especially known for her work on Japanese artists and art collectives in the 1960s and 1970s such as Genpei Akasegawa, Hi-Red Center, Kazuo Shiraga, Gutai, and Mono-ha. In 2017, she published a single-authored scholarly monograph, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (The MIT Press, 2016), which used archival research to examine the work of three Japanese artists/collectives, GUN, the Play, and Yutaka Matsuzawa, and show how their work intersected with that of international conceptual artists such as Stanley Brouwn and Yves Klein. Tomii's book was awarded the prestigious Robert Motherwell Book Award, which came with a $10,000 cash prize. The prize selection committee praised the book as "impeccably researched and clearly written...offering a wealth of new insight and analysis on modernist art history of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s...thereby expanding and challenging the understanding of global modernisms." Since that time, the organization has grown to become an international network with more than 200 art history researchers as members. Among other activities, PoNJA-GenKon has organized eight international conferences and symposia, co-hosted by Yale University (2005), The Getty Center and UCLA (2007), the Guggenheim Museum (2009), the University of Michigan (2010), the Asia Society, New York (2010), the University of Southern California (2012), the Museum of Modern Art New York University, and the Japan Society (2014), and the University of Chicago (2017).

Other work

In 2013, Tomii appeared in the documentary film Cutie and the Boxer, about Japanese avant-garde artist Ushio Shinohara and his wife Noriko.

Exhibitions curated or co-curated

Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum of Art, 1999) Noriyuki Yanagi・Naoyoshi Hikosaka Two Person Exhibition (Whitebox, New York, 2001) Resounding Spirit: Japanese Contemporary Art of the 1960s (Gibson Gallery, 2005) Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art (Getty Center, 2007) Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s (Japan Society, 2019)

Selected publications

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Reiko Tomii, OCLC/WorldCat encompasses roughly 90 works in 172 publications in 1 languages and 2,039 library holdings.

Books

Book chapters

Scholarly articles

Articles in exhibition catalogs