a personal journey

Description

West Encounters East, developed by Miami-based art historian and museum trustee Stella M. Holmes in 2010, has the mission of discovering and promoting artists whose work expresses the ENCOUNTER between Asian and Latin American cultures, a fruitful engagement that is now over a century old. The creative intelligence of this ENCOUNTER uses bicultural aesthetic codes to forge innovative visions and artistic vocabularies that create new systems of meaning appropriate for our multi-cultural, globalized age. West Encounters East seeks out and promotes signal artists whose work crosses cultural divides. In addition to curating exhibits, West Encounters East is strongly committed to academic grounding and calls on art historians, cultural scholars and literary writers to connect to viewers from all backgrounds and to situate the artwork in our shared global socio-historical context. The deeper mission, in the face of an age of challenge between differing civilizations, is to promote mutual awareness and respect as modes of greater tolerance and more positive interchange. West Encounters East transforms the “culture gap” into artistic cultural ENCOUNTERS, and thereby offers the public vital tools for today’s multiculturalism and globalization. The documentary film West Encounters East, will broadcast in May on public television across the United States. This one-hour documentary film explores the themes of immigration, alienation and assimilation through the works of Japanese-Brazilian artists, descendants of a century-old diaspora that has given São Paulo the largest Japanese population outside Japan. The concept was created and developed by West Encounters East Founder Stella M. Holmes, who was inspired by the works of these bicultural artists to embark upon a personal journey of discovery.