It gives us great pleasure to open the exhibition, "INNOVATION: American Art of Today from the Misumi Art Collection." Since its opening in 1990, Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art has worked to introduce post-World War II American art, largely through standing exhibitions of the works by such artists as Mark Rothko and Frank Stella included in the museum's collection and through special exhibitions.
Through our initial hope of realizing exhibitions which provide an overview of the richly active arts of America today, we first became aware of the Misumi Art Collection and its focus on post-war American arts, primarily high quality prints. Of a different character from the foundations which are corporate in name only, there are a number of American corporations which actively collect artworks and regularly display them throughout their offices. But the Misumi Art Collection is to be highly acclaimed as epic-making in the field of corporate art in Japan. Thirty-five of the forty-one artists represented in this exhibition are alive today, and the average age among the eight whose paintings are shown si only 43 years old. all energetic artists, and many of them make their debut in Japan in this exhibition.
Innovation, a concept to raise in terms of art, and in terms of business. We hope that this forward looking exhibition which forecasts the relationship between art and business in the 21st century will elicit just these forms of innovation.
We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincerest appreciation and respect to the Misumi Corporation upon this occasion of the premier showing of many of the works in their collection. Further we would like to convey our heartfelt gratitude to the patrons of the exhibition, the American Embassy, Chiba Prefecture, Sakura City, and The Board of Education of Sakura City; to Spark Inc. for its cooperation, and to all those individuals and organizations involved in the realization of this exhibition.