A Tale of Two Balconies

This cleverly designed book about Katsushika Hokusai’s The Sazaidō of Gohyakurakanji and James McNeill Whistler's Variations in Flesh Colour and Green - The Balcony, also includes drawing, collage, coloring and press-out activities.

With a presentation that divides the book into two equal parts, A Tale of Two Balconies investigates the elements that make each of these artworks—both in the collection of the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution—unique. Exploring the depicted locations of each (in Edo Japan and Victorian England) enables deeper insight as the authors examine the idea of the balcony itself as a construct at once both private and public – creating a view and juxtaposing the different cultural domains both within and beyond the balcony railing.

This stunning book is double-fronted, so readers can begin reading from either side. A carefully-designed centre section includes immersive creative activities in which readers actively engage with the themes of perspective and recollection through their own art-making activities – collage, drawing, colouring, or building a pop-out Hokusai diorama and Victorian Whistler toy theatre.

Kit Brooks is the curator of Asian Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Specializing in prints and paintings of Japan’s Edo (1603–1868) and Meiji eras (1868–1912), their primary research interests revolve around the re-evaluation of “eccentric” artists of the eighteenth century, as well as the relationship between illustrated books and paintings, and special prints that emulate the visual qualities of other media. Brooks has held positions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Children’s Museum in Boston. They curated the exhibition Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi (1839–1892) at the Worcester Art Museum (2015) and co-curated Living Proof: Drawing in 19th-Century Japan at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2017–18). At the National Museum of Asian Art, Kit worked on a number of exhibitions, including Underdogs and Antiheroes: Japanese Prints from the Moskowitz Collection (2022-2023). Kit also curated Ay-Ō’s Happy Rainbow Hell, the first exhibition of the Japanese artist AyŌ’s (b. 1931) work in the United States, and authored the accompanying catalogue.

Katherine Roeder is an assistant professor in the history of art, design and visual culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a curatorial fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, she curated Dewing’s Poetic Worlds, and was a co-curator of the Whistler in Watercolor and The Peacock Room in Blue and White exhibitions. She contributed to the Whistler in Watercolor exhibition catalogue and online collection catalogue. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Delaware with a focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American visual culture. Her book Wide Awake in Slumberland (2014), a monograph on cartoonist Winsor McCay, was nominated for an Eisner Award. She previously worked at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Gallery and held fellowships at the National Portrait Gallery and the Library of Congress.