Image: Yashima Gakutei, A Woman with a Box and A Woman with Spools, 1820s. Gift of George Pierce and Pauline Pumpelly Cabot Metcalf 56.039.35–.36.
The RISD Museum in Providence is showing ‘The Artistry and Reunion of Two Surimono Albums’ from 23 May to 4 October 2026, in Metcalf Gallery 2 (WA 404) in its Asian art galleries. The exhibition brings two accordion-style albums of Japanese woodblock prints back together, and is curated by Wai Yee Chiong, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Curator of East Asian Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and former curator of Asian art at the RISD Museum. An opening celebration was held on 21 May 2026.
According to the museum, the albums were assembled in Osaka nearly 200 years ago by the poet Iga Kurimi, who mounted his collection of surimono — literally “printed things” — into two albums combining images with poetry. The prints were inked in rich colours on fine paper and embellished with raised designs and metallic pigments, and their poetic inscriptions add a further layer of meaning.
The museum recounts that in 1863 the young American geologist Raphael Pumpelly received Kurimi’s albums as a farewell gift from Japanese friends, and that they then descended through the Pumpelly family. One album, now unbound into individual prints, reached the RISD Museum in the 1950s; the other, still intact, is in the collection of the Chiba City Museum of Art in Japan. The exhibition reunites the two sets and examines the contexts in which the prints were commissioned, created and shared, offering a view of Japan’s art and literary scene in the 1800s.
Prints on view include works by Yashima Gakutei, among them ‘A Woman with a Box and A Woman with Spools’ of the 1820s, a gift of George Pierce and Pauline Pumpelly Cabot Metcalf, along with prints by Nagayama Kōin and Ryūryūkyo Shinsai. The museum has published a checklist and a press release, and a Critical Encounters programme, ‘Friendship, Poetry, and Japanese Surimono Prints’, is scheduled for Saturday 19 September, 1–6 pm.
The exhibition is sponsored by Bank of America, with grants from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Japan Foundation and additional programme support from the IFPDA Foundation and the Felicia Fund. The museum is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm and Thursday from noon to 8 pm, with free admission on Sundays and on Thursday evenings from 5 to 8 pm.
