A friend recently alerted me to this exhibit at Ohio’s Canton Museum of Art which opens on February 9 and runs until April 26, 2009.

Kimono as Art: The Landscapes of Itchiku Kubota opens at the Canton Museum of Art on February 9, 2009. This breathtaking exhibit features 40 giant landscape kimono of the Japanese Master who spent much of his lifetime perfecting a lost textile process called Tsujigahana.

The works are by Japanese designer Itchiku Kubota whom I researched for an earlier post. While the museum article lauds him for “perfecting” tsujigahana, it has been pointed out to me by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada and also states in Kubota’s own book Opulence: The Kimonos and Robes of Itchiku Kubota that what he achieved was a modern version of a lost art. His technique is labor intensive and likely as close to the original tsujigahana as we may ever get, but is not recognized in Japan as actual tsujigahana.

Regardless of the semantics, if I were in Ohio, I’d drop everything and go see the exhibit without delay. It looks fascinating. A companion book for the exhibit, Kimono as Art: The Landscapes of Itchiku Kubota, was published last year and has now been added to my Amazon wish list.