Make a Unique Japanese Mask - Free

Make It! Jun 18, 2014

This is a Free Event - including museum admission for Free! First we will view the mask exhibit at 5 pm to get ideas, then at 5:30 we will go to where they finalize the mask-making event will be (they weren't sure right now), where we will make our own masks! This is a terrific opportunity to make a mask...for Free


with some Art Explorer friends! Join me in a night of creativity and fun!

Explore Masks of Japanese Noh Theatre in the exhibition Quiet Rage, Gentle Wail in The Lyon Gallery, and then join us to make a unique mask of your own!

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Drawing from recent gifts to the Museum, Quiet Rage, Gentle Wail will explore Noh, the traditional Japanese theater form that incorporates music, dance and drama. Noh Theater was established during the fourteenth century when a few talented writer-actors transformed the popular entertainment into a sophisticated, intellectual art backed by the ruling class. Through the stories adopted from well-known myths, historical events, and classical literatures, Noh dramas explore profound human emotions with subtle and symbolic performances. For contemporary Japanese as much as foreigners, Noh Theater is a thought-provoking, yet complex art that is often hard to comprehend.

Bringing together different media that relate to Noh Theater, this exhibition will have a multi-dimensional approach to appreciate Noh and its aesthetics: simplicity, nuance, and the distaste for realism. Included in the exhibition are 22 Noh masks, a pair of two-panel screens and approximately 24 prints that depict Noh actors on stage.

The masks are from the pre-modern and early modern eras, and encompass a wide variety of specimens, from a quiet male figure to an angry female demon. Together they reveal how such a mask with its emblematic expression contributes to a subtle performance of Noh. In some roles, an actor wearing a mask can express different emotion by varying the tilt of the wearer’s head. Museum visitors can witness this effect by viewing the images of one of the masks photographed from three different angles.

The exhibition is part of the three-year project, Japan in Global Context, organized by ASU and funded by the Japan Foundation. Phoenix Art Museum is one of the participants in this grant project.

Sponsored by: Margaret T. Morris Foundation

> ALWAYS free parking in the museum lot AND just North in the United Methodist Church lot.