Painting the Floating World:
Masterpieces from the Weston Collection

This major catalogue — on Japanese Ukiyo-e paintings from four centuries from the collection of Roger Weston — contains important scholarship on one of the world’s greatest collections of Japanese paintings. Several metaphors helped us define the project’s design direction:
— Ukiyo–e: the impermanence of everyday life.
— Artworks that were sacred, yet common: attainable, relatable works that reflected the world of ordinary people, as they wanted to see it.
— The Tadao Ando room in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Weston Wing: accessible everyday materials put together in transformative ways; unassuming, minimal, uplifting.
— Collector Roger Weston’s suggestion: “Mami (co-curator of the exhibition) and I want it to look clean and simple, like Japan.”

We tried to develop formats that would be easily navigable by scholars, yet also accessible to the general public. We considered how best to organize a wide variety of content on the catalogue entry pages, while keeping the text clear and legible. And we tried to establish means that allowed readers to choose whether or not to view the shunga (spring pictures) works. Both the catalogue and exhibition received international press, including from the Wall Street Journal, among others.

American Alliance of Museums Publications Design Competition, First Prize, 2019
Midwest Art History Society Award for Outstanding Catalogue, 2019
Society of Typographic Arts 100 Award, 2020

Janice Katz. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2018. 320 pages.