Matsubara Naoko


Matsubara Naoko is a Japanese-Canadian print-maker.

Life and work

Matsubara graduated from the Kyoto University of Applied Arts in 1960. She then pursued an MFA in the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on a Fulbright Travel Grant, and since then has traveled extensively and taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn—a rare distinction for a Japanese woman. She also studied one year at the Royal College of Art, London. After travel abroad, the artist returned to Japan for two years, before going back to the United States. There she worked as assistant to Fritz Eichenberg, and also taught at the Pratt Institute of Graphic Art in New York, as well as at the University of Rhode Island. Currently she lives and works in Oakville, Canada.
Image:INaoko 1.JPG|300px|thumb|right|Woodblock print of the Boston Public Library by Matsubara Naoko.
Naoko Matsubara’s father was the chief priest in a Shinto shrine in Kyoto. Shrines and temples became one of the major themes of Matsubara’s works. Naoko Matsubara’s style is influenced by her teacher Munakata Shiko, who worked in the mingei tradition.
Her works are part of the collections of many museums around the world, such as the Portland Art Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Albertina in Vienna, the British Museum in London, the Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of [Fine Arts, Boston], the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress in Washington, the Hamburg Museum of Arts and Crafts, the Haifa Museum in Israel and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.
She is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2024, she had her first Art Gallery of Ontario solo exhibition with 20 woodcut prints, anchored by Tagasode, a monumental 2 meter long single-sheet print which is the culmination of Matsubara's printmaking career.
Naoko Matsubara's sister is the novelist Hisako Matsubara, they collaborated on the publication of the Japanese tale Taketori Monogatari in German. Naoko did the illustrations, while her sister did the translation and the commentary.

Publications

  • Matsubara, Naoko. Boston Impressions. Woodcuts by Naoko Matsubara. Text by Sinclair Hitchings. Barre Publications, 1970.
  • Matsubara, Naoko. Kyoto Woodcuts. Tokyo, New York: Kodansha International; New York: Distributed in the United States by Kodansha International/USA, through Harper & Row, 1978.
  • Matsubara, Naoko. In Praise of Trees. NY, London: Mosaic Press, 1985.
  • Matsubara, Naoko. Tibetan Sky. Ontario: Bayeux Arts Inc., 1997.
  • Matsubara, Naoko. Tales of Days Gone By. Tuttle Publishing, 2004.

Additional sources