Brooklyn Museum Unveils Rare 600-Work Manga Show

The Brooklyn Museum's Art of Manga gathers more than 600 original drawings, with Kyodo calling it rare for so many originals to be shown together.

The Brooklyn Museum gave a media preview on Wednesday of Art of Manga, an exhibition presenting more than 600 original drawings by popular manga artists, according to Kyodo News. Conceived by the de Young Museum in San Francisco as a traveling show, the exhibition opens to the public Saturday and runs through January 31. Kyodo reports the museum says it is rare for so many original manga drawings to be displayed together, making the New York staging a notable gathering of original pages for devoted readers.

Kyodo News reports the show features booths dedicated to 10 manga artists, including Tetsuya Chiba and the late Fujio Akatsuka, whom the museum's website describes as foundational manga artists. Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece, Rumiko Takahashi of Urusei Yatsura, and Mari Yamazaki of Thermae Romae are also among the featured names. Each booth highlights the artist's distinctive style, creative process, and use of manga as a means of expression, according to the same report.

One of the exhibition's stated themes is to showcase manga's immersive power and social impact, with support from Japanese publishers, per Kyodo News. Curator Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, emeritus professor at the University of East Anglia and deputy director general of the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, told Kyodo that calling manga an art, seeing the original drawings first-hand allows one to see the details of the artists' techniques, enhancing the experience. For fans, that framing argues originals reveal what reproductions cannot.

Shaw Local reports that on the same date the Coliseum Museum in Oregon, Illinois opened its Moments in Monochrome exhibit, running October 1 through November 14 with 82 works by 43 artists from Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin in media from acrylic and charcoal to steel and wood. According to Shaw Local, the exhibit will be judged by artist and educator Heather Shore, with awards presented at a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on October 9 featuring music by Grass Attack. Together the two shows show museums of very different scales staking claims on craft this month.