Happy Holidays and Small Miracles
Commissioner holiday cards are inspired by the Museum of Modern Art's Junior Council, which in 1954 initiated a holiday card program to “help foster their common interest in the arts and a desire to see artists supported soundly and liberally in this country”. Each season, we commission or collaborate with an artist whose work feels especially timely and soul-filling.
For our sixth annual holiday initiative, we invited Japanese native and South Florida-based painter Harumi Abe to share her work as a digital commission animated in a special collaboration with Samuel Lopez De Victoria. Titled Fern Forest NGC290, The cool palette and gentle movement of the branches transport us to a place of equanimity, where we are both one with the present moment and in motion with the universe.
From our families to yours, heartfelt wishes for the holidays.
Harumi Abe, Fern Forest NGC290
Q & A with Harumi Abe
Commissioner: Forests are a predominant theme in your work.
Harumi Abe: Nature feeds us, protects us and sometimes destroys us. We have been altering nature as we expand into a civilized society, but in the meantime have been tending nature as a form of garden in our daily life.
C: In thinking about climate change, palette, or flora, what role does South Florida play in your work?
HA: The idea of home and belonging has been an important part of my investigation since I immigrated to the U.S. in 2000. When I stand in the Everglades or my backyard, I try to imagine the view from these places 100 years ago or 100 years from now. Nothing is permanent, not even life on Earth. The view I see only exists at the moment, and it is a miracle.
C: What would you like viewers to take away from your work?
HA: I consider ideas about home, garden, utopia, time, and sublime. My wish is that the images leave an impression on the audience for them to look at their surrounding nature in new ways.
C: Please tell us about this specific work.
HA: This painting’s title is “Fern Forest NGC290”. In this series, I layered images from the NASA Webb telescope with a nature walk in a South Florida park. I was thinking about the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence and how the earth was born from escape and might eventually return to the universe.
C: What is bringing you joy these days?
HA: Hanging out with family, gardening and painting.
Harumi Abe is a Japanese native artist from Tokorozawa, Saitama who has lived in South Florida nearly half of her life. Referencing Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, her layered landscapes intend to overlap memories and sway perspective to serve an idea of home and represent a “topography of our intimate being” while visually materializing belonging. Connecting her birthplace and her residence, Harumi’s paintings intend to magnify a morphing relationship called shakkei or “borrowed scenery”. In search of balance and unity in design, through color and placement, the Florida landscape is the muse, while Japan remains the inspiration.