2023/8/21 Closing – 8/04 Opening : Los Angeles: Robert Crowder Award Exhibition features Ayaka Hoshino at Shumei Hall, Pasadena, Aug. 4-21

LOS ANGELES – This year’s Robert Crowder Award Exhibition features Ms. Ayaka Hoshino of Gumma Prefecture. She is the 8th recipient of this prize. Japanese Painting Show “With Four Seasons by Ms. Ayaka Hoshino” will be held at the Shumei Hall, 2430 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena from Friday, August 4 through Monday, August 21. Gallery hours are 9:30am to 5:30pm, Monday through Saturday, Closed Sundays.  Free and open to the public.

Ms. Hoshino graduated from Gunma University and has been teaching art and science at the municipal elementary and junior high schools in Gunma Prefecture. She won the Robert Crowder Award at Nihonga-In Exhibition held at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 2020. As a supplemental prize, she was invited to Los Angeles and given her personal exhibition.

Ms. Hoshino’s lifework theme of her painting is rich Japanese four seasons. Through her experiences of a teacher, she has been painting “daily life” with nature. She says, “Japan has rich four seasons. When you superimpose your life on sceneries of the four seasons and familiar small creatures, you will appreciate delicate sensibilities of Japanese people which has lasted forever.”

When Ms. Hoshino is in Los Angeles, she is planning to visit Bethany, Illinois where is Mr. Crowder’s hometown, and Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois which he graduated as a violinist. Also, she will be visiting national parks in Arizona and Utah.

To support promising artists and musicians, the Robert Crowder Foundation was founded in 2012 by Mr. Yasumasa Tanano who was working for Mr. Crowder since 1984.

Illinois-born Mr. Robert H. Crowder was a renowned traditional Japanese painter in Los Angeles. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 99.

Mr. Crowder became a teacher at a missionary school in Pyeongyang in 1933. When he traveled around Taiwan and Japan for vacations, he was enchanted by Japanese arts and culture.

Mr. Crowder moved to Japan in 1935 and started to learn Japanese painting under Mr. Shunko Mochizuki in Tokyo. Later Mr. Mochizuki established “Nihonga In” which has been a group of Japanese painting based in Tokyo. After the war broke out in 1941, Mr. Crowder was captured as PWO and forced to captive life for 22 months.

In 1943, Mr. Crowder decided to move back to the U.S. on the 2nd Prisoner Exchange Boat. After the war, he started a company for an interior design and painted Japanese folding screens (Byobu) and murals in Beverly Hills.

In 2002, he exhibited a series of Japanese screens “Endanger Birds of Japan” at Doizaki Gallery of the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles.