Kyoto Seika University
As an educator, April Vollmer, artist and author of "Japanese Woodblock Print Workshop: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Art of Mokuhanga" wrote, "Today most art training takes place in universities, and two prominent Japanese artists—Tetsuya Noda at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku) and Akira Kurosaki at Kyoto Seika University—are largely responsible for the new international wave of Mokuhanga (Woodblock printing in Japan) awareness. Noda headed the woodblock department at Tokyo Geidai from 1991 until his retirement in 2007. Cultural exchange and the promotion of Japanese art forms are both part of the university’s mission, and Noda spearheaded an innovative program in which traditional Ukiyo-e master printers came each year from the Adachi Institute to work with students, providing a link between the traditional workshop system and the modern university. He also nurtured contacts with the West, and his 2004 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Asian Art clearly showed the influence of his study of Western art, combining Mokuhanga backgrounds photo-screenprinted scenes of everyday life. In 1998 Noda came to Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies to teach mokuhanga to New York area printmakers. Many of the artists now teaching mokuhanga internationally studied with Noda, including Seiichiro Miida (who has now taken Noda’s place at Tokyo Geidai), Raita Miyadera (also at Tokyo Geidai), Michael Schneider (Austria), Tyler Starr (US), Roslyn Kean (Australia), and others from Turkey to Korea to Pakistan."