Skip to content

Curated by Alexandra Munroe

Yokohama Museum of Art, February 5–March 30, 1994
Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, September 14, 1994–January 8, 1995
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, May 31–August 27, 1995

Scream Against the Sky raises at least as many questions as it answers, but it confirms beyond doubt that any reading of contemporary Japanese art in purely Western terms will not do. . . . In Scream Against the Sky it is the end—awful, serene or ineffably empty—that is explored over and over and by means that are often marvelous.”
—Holland Cotter, New York Times

The survey exhibition Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky initiated the academic and curatorial field of postwar and contemporary Japanese art in North America. This pioneering exhibition traced the development, identity, and expression of Japanese avant-garde art since 1945 seen within the social and political context of postwar and contemporary culture in Japan. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky was the largest survey of postwar and contemporary Japanese art ever presented in Japan and marked the first exhibition of postwar Japanese art in North America. Taken from a score by Yoko Ono of 1961, the title conveys the extremist action and metaphysical mind that characterize Japanese avant-garde art.

Organized by Yokohama Museum of Art where it was presented in 1994, it toured the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, under the auspices of the Japan Foundation and InterCultura. Munroe’s book of the same title is the standard textbook in English on postwar Japanese art.