“The EMA’s recent acquisitions demonstrate the museum’s values. Global, historically significant, and relevant to the curriculum, these newly collected works, as a group, reflect contemporary art and culture and inspire reexaminations of past art and time periods. Through purchases and donations, EMA curators build the collection to support the needs of the academic community at Indiana University and the surrounding community.”
—Danielle Johnson, Director of Curatorial Affairs
Opening this small box reveals two mirrors that reflect the viewer’s smile. When Yoko Ono, artist, peace activist, and widow of John Lennon, was grieving after Lennon’s death, she made herself smile in the hopes that it would make her feel better, which it eventually did. Wanting to harness the power of smiling, she created Box of Smile. Ono said, “I just wanted to have a box that people can look into, and when they’re sad and angry and all that, to see how it looks smiling.” This is an authorized continuation of the 1971 edition. Ono has created several editions of this work, indicating her desire to spread the concept widely.
Seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker Jeremy Frey is among today’s most significant artists working in the medium. This print is a direct impression of a fleeting moment in the creative process: the basket’s base is woven, but the walls are not yet formed—an in-progress stage where the vessel’s final shape is full of possibilities. Frey collaborated with the printmaking workshop Wingate Studio where they inked the surface of the woven strips and ran it through the printing press. The exact texture of the bark is captured through the direct meeting of the woven form, ink, and paper. Multiple thicknesses of material increase the pressure on those specific areas. This results in a darker appearance, capturing and emphasizing the woven structure as well as the natural variation of the black ash.
The Eskenazi Museum of Art commissioned contemporary artist Ibrahima Thiam, co-curator of the 2025 exhibition Portraiture and Archives in African Photography, to make new artwork that responds to the Eskenazi Museum’s collection. Thiam created this artwork, which references Tijani Sitou’s portrait photographs in the museum’s collection. He re-printed Sitou’s photographs onto wax-print textiles that are part of a wider practice in West Africa of making cloth to commemorate a person. His textiles honor Sitou and the legacy of his important photographic career. Thiam designed the installation to emulate the ways in which people often encounter textiles in West Africa—hanging on clotheslines.
Sekino Jun’ichirō’s woodblock print seriesThe New Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, created between 1959 and 1974, presents a striking portrayal of Japan’s changing landscape in the twentieth century. The subject has been popular in Japan since the nineteenth century when Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) created his famous edition. The series appealed to a burgeoning public interest in travel and scenic views with its depiction of the fifty-three lodging stations along the Tokaido, the major route that connected Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto during the Edo period (1603–1868).
Sekino’s inclusion of electric power lines, motorized highways, and the rail system highlights an increasingly industrialized country with faster modes of travel. The prints showcase his distinct style and technical expertise, which made him a leading figure in Japan’s sōsaku hanga (“creative print”) movement.
This generous gift of forty prints (with the remaining fifteen a promised gift) marks the first complete set of a Japanese print series in the Eskenazi Museum’s collection. Sekino Jun’ichirō’s woodblock print series The New Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, created between 1959 and 1974, presents a striking portrayal of Japan’s changing landscape in the twentieth century. The subject has been popular in Japan since the nineteenth century when Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) created his famous edition. The series appealed to a burgeoning public interest in travel and scenic views with its depiction of the fifty-three lodging stations along the Tokaido, the major route that connected Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto during the Edo period (1603–1868).
About the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art
Since its establishment in 1941, the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art has grown from a small university teaching collection into one of the most significant university art collections in the United States. A preeminent teaching museum on the Indiana University campus, its internationally acclaimed collection includes more than 47,000 objects representing nearly every art-producing culture throughout history from around the world.
The Eskenazi Museum of Art recently completed a $30 million renovation of its acclaimed I. M. Pei–designed building. The newly renovated museum is an enhanced teaching resource for Indiana University and southern Indiana. The museum is dedicated to engaging students, faculty, artists, scholars, alumni, and the wider public through the cultivation of new ideas and scholarship.
