Skip to main content
Apply Give
Menu

Alicia Volk

Alicia Volk

Professor, Japanese Art, Art History and Archaeology

(301) 405-1482

4210 Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building
Get Directions

Education

Ph.D., , Yale University

Research Expertise

Asia
Gender
Global Modernism
Modern and Contemporary
Race/Ethnicity
Visual Culture

Alicia Volk's scholarship addresses a range of mediums and critical issues in Japanese art from the nineteenth century to the present, including its relationship to the arts of Europe, the United States, and Asia. Deeply committed to the creation of more expansive and inclusive art histories, in her research Professor Volk analyzes Japanese art on its own terms and challenges the assumptions and biases undergirding an art historical canon that places it at the margins.

Her book In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art (University of California Press, 2010) places early twentieth-century Japanese painting in the framework of global modernism. This book was awarded the inaugural Phillips Book Prize of the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. An exhibition and catalog Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement (University of Washington Press, 2005) tells the story of the transformation of the print as a medium of cultural identity and exchange in the context of Japan's post-World War II rehabilitation and reentry into the world community of nations.

Professor Volk is now completing a manuscript titled In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan, which brings a novel critical perspective concerning empire to the study of Japanese art under the American occupation of Japan (1945-1952). Through the analysis of charismatic artworks in a range of mediums and political commitments, the book shows how the forgotten art of a country in the shadows of American empire variously accommodated and resisted the Cold War global realignment that followed on the heels of World War II.

Other publications have treated such topics as Japanese prints, screens (byôbu), and illustrated books; the avant-garde, images of blacks and racialized representation, the geopolitical dimensions of Japanese self-representations at world's fairs, female artists, and contemporary art.

Professor Volk received her PhD in Japanese art history from Yale University in 2005 and joined the University of Maryland faculty in 2006. From 2009-2012 she served as an officer of the Japan Art History Forum. As a Fulbright Research Scholar she was affiliated with Waseda University in Tokyo. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from such organizations as the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and
Cultures and the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, the Metropolitan Center for Far Eastern Art Studies, the Blakemore Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Ishibashi Foundation, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, the Center for Historical Studies at the University of Maryland, and the Graduate Research Board of the University of Maryland.

Students who wish to apply for the graduate program in Japanese art history are strongly advised to submit results from the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) with their applications.

 

Publications

“Art and Women’s Liberation in a Newly Democratic Japan, with a Focus on Migishi Setsuko and Akamatsu Toshiko”

This essay reveals how women artists across the spectrums of artistic practice and political conviction enacted women’s liberation in the public sphere and engaged in the democratization of art in early post-World War II Japan.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
Japan’s defeat in the Second World War represented an opportunity for radical reform of the institutions and practices of art and for rethinking the role of art and artist in the public sphere. Calls for change and revolution were couched in terms of “democratization.” Women were some of the earliest and most obvious beneficiaries of the Allied Occupation of Japan’s democratization policies. Focusing on Akamatsu Toshiko and Migishi Setsuko, two of early postwar Japan’s most successful female painters, this article asks how female artists sought to capture the potential of social and political change for women in particular and society in general at this transformative moment in Japanese history.

“Beauty and Violence, Art and War: Some Reflections on the Visual Cultures of Imperial Japan”

Taking three recently published books on Japanese modern art as its starting point, this essay considers the relationship between art and war, and the aesthetics of beauty and violence, during the period of Japan’s modern wars from the 1890s through 1945

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
Taking three recently published books on Japanese modern art as its starting point, this essay considers the relationship between art and war, and the aesthetics of beauty and violence, during the period of Japan’s modern wars from the 1890s through 1945.

Read More about “Beauty and Violence, Art and War: Some Reflections on the Visual Cultures of Imperial Japan”

“The Image of the Black in Japanese Art, 19th Century to the Present”

This essay charts a history of representations of Blacks in Japanese art and visual culture from the early 19th century to the present, including diasporic Japanese American art in the first half of the 20th century.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:

How have Blacks been understood in Japan and represented in Japanese art? What role did the representation of Blacks perform in the construction of Japan’s own racialized identity vis-a-vis both blackness and whiteness? How did the Japanese artistic diaspora in the United States, as part of an Asian minority subject to discrimination—including Japanese and Japanese-Amerian incarceration during World War II—approach the subject? Covering a period of approximately two hundred years, from the early 19th century to the early 21st century, this essay is the first study of its kind and provides a basis for the consideration of the racialized nature of Japanese art and modern art more generally.

Read More about “The Image of the Black in Japanese Art, 19th Century to the Present”

"From Soft Power to Hard Sell: Images of Japan at American Expositions, 1915-1965”

This essay demonstrate the evolving ways in which art and artifacts served as a vital “soft power” component of Japanese diplomacy at World's Fairs held in the United States between 1915 and 1965.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:

The essay analyzes how the Japanese government variously used its exhibition spaces at American world’s fairs in the 20th century to present an image of the country conducive to the economic and geopolitical goals embraced by the government and industry.

Read More about "From Soft Power to Hard Sell: Images of Japan at American Expositions, 1915-1965”

Extended review essay of Gennifer Weisenfeld, Imaging Disaster:

A state of the scholarship essay on Japanese modern art.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
A state of the scholarship essay on Japanese modern art.

“Authority, Autonomy and the Early Taishô ‘Avant-garde’”

This essay explicates the relational nature and political context of the Japanese avant-garde between 1900 and 1930.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
This essay addresses the problematic notion of the “avant-garde” in the context of Japanese modern art. It looks at the formation in 1907 of the national salon, the Bunten, to elucidate the relational dynamics of art organizations in early twentieth-century Japan, especially during the Taisho period (1912 – 27) when the Fusain Society (Fyûzankai) and the Nika Society (Nikakai) came into being as alternatives to the Bunten. The essay elucidates one of the fundamental paradoxes of Taisho-period art — the simultaneous proliferation of art organizations and artistic individualism — and the dialectic between authority and autonomy that prevailed in art under the conditions of Japanese modernity.

Read More about “Authority, Autonomy and the Early Taishô ‘Avant-garde’”

In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art

In Pursuit of Universalism is the first comprehensive, English-language study of early twentieth-century Japanese modern art.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

Read More about In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorô and Japanese Modern Art

Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement, 1945-1970

Made in Japan: The Postwar Creative Print Movement examines the artistic dialogue between Japan and America that blossomed in the wake of World War II.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
The Japanese Creative Print (sôsaku hanga) movement, which had originated in the early twentieth century in opposition to traditional ukiyo-e prints, came to worldwide prominence between 1945 and 1970. Forging ties with artists, scholars, museums, and collectors overseas, Japanese printmakers brought their artistic innovations into fruitful interaction with a global art scene. Americans had long considered imported objects labeled “Made in Japan” as shoddy and inferior in quality, but they warmly welcomed Creative Print artists and prized their work for its consummate craftsmanship, inclination toward abstraction, and sometimes exotic subject matter. Benefiting from government-sponsored exchange programs, Japanese printmakers performed an important role as cultural ambassadors and helped smooth tensions between the peoples of two nations that had recently been enemies at war but that were now allies in peace. The prints documented in Made in Japan range widely in treatment and medium, embracing woodcut, stencil, lithography, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, and screenprint. Essays outline the history of the Creative Print movement and its American patronage from the Occupation through the 1960s, and consider its relationship to the earlier tradition of ukiyo-e prints. With nearly one hundred color illustrations, the book is the first to narrate the Creative Print movement in all its diversity and constitutes a major reappraisal of one of the twentieth century’s most important moments of cultural and artistic exchange.

Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Modern Era

Japan and Paris demonstrates the deep cross-cultural nature of art in Japan from about 1880 to 1930.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Christine Guth, Emiko Yamanashi
Dates:
Illustrated with masterpieces from Japanese collections by Matisse, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Corot, Cézanne, and Monet, Japan and Paris explores the history of collecting Western art in Japan and its influence on Japanese modern art. In particular, it addresses the development of Western-style modernist impulses as Japan's early interest in the Barbizon School extended to include modes of expression such as Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, and Fauvism. In addition to showcasing works by some of the best-known French and European painters, works by Japanese artists who were instrumental in the introduction of Western modes of expression to Japan are included, such as Kojima Zenzaburo, Kume Keiichiro, Maeta Kanji, Mitsutani Kunishiro, and Fujita Tsuguharu.

Read More about Japan and Paris: Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and the Modern Era

“Yorozu Tetsugorô and Taishô-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese Print Became Avant-garde"

In this study I examine the emergence of printmaking as a field of modernist practice in early twentieth century Japan.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
An analysis of early twentieth-century Japanese “creative prints” (sôsaku hanga) as a new vehicle for modernist expression by the hands of oil painters.

Read More about “Yorozu Tetsugorô and Taishô-period Creative Prints: When the Japanese Print Became Avant-garde"

“Katsura Yuki and the Japanese Avant-garde"

This essay addresses increased opportunities for, and persistent resistance to, female artists in mid-20th-century Japan.

Art History and Archaeology

Author/Lead: Alicia Volk
Dates:
In a close analysis of Katsura Yuki's transwar work and practice, I argue that her representational strategies allowed her to engage with gender difference while liberating her from its traps.

Read More about “Katsura Yuki and the Japanese Avant-garde"