Description
Lancaster-Miller Publishers, Published 1981. Hardcover, 78 pp.; 22 cm; illustrated with color reproductions of the artist's serigraphs throughout.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Glossy white paper over boards, unlettered, light bumping to edges and mild shelf wear. Binding tight. Previous owner's gift inscription in ink dated 5/10/88 on half-title, otherwise unmarked. Illustrated dust jacket reproducing Oda's serigraph Rainbow, spine white lettered in black, has a 3/4 inch tear along top edge of front panel at spine, smaller nicks and tears, light creasing to edges, and fading near spine on front and rear panels. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Oda takes the wind and thunder gods of Japanese folk painting, traditionally male, and rewrites them as a female figure: full-bodied, unhurried, cheerfully naked, riding a penny-farthing through a cabbage field or sailing a New Year treasure ship loaded with rice and flowers. The book gathers her silkscreens of the 1970s and 1980, reproduced in color, each carrying the artist's own note on its origin along with dimensions, year and edition size, most in editions of thirty to seventy-five. Her preface is autobiographical, opening on a memory of drawing a princess on the tatami floor at five years old with a new set of crayons bought just after the war, and turning to the Tokyo household she grew up in, a father who taught Buddhist history at the Imperial Army Academy and a mother whose height and fair skin had her likened to the Kwannon Goddess. A biography and exhibition list run to 1981, by which point her work was held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Library of Congress. Designed by Frances Butler, printed by Dai Nippon. The original 1981 Lancaster-Miller edition; Oda was then living and working at Green Gulch Farm at the San Francisco Zen Center.