Speaker Series

When hearing the word “folding,” Japanese origami, or the art of folding paper, is probably the first thought that comes to mind. Imagine a future where an entire architectural structure is flat-packed, carried to a construction site, and folded by hand into a rigid three-dimensional shelter. This is the kind of future Dr. Joseph Choma is turning into a reality. Come to meet Dr. Choma at the Morikami!

Alyson Richman, bestselling author of over ten historical novels, including The Lost Wife, The Thread Collectors, and The Missing Pages, will share how her early years living and studying in Japan inspired her debut novel, The Mask Carver's Son. She attended the American School in Japan for part of her high school education and during college, spent a year in Kyoto as an apprentice to an artisan who carved masks for the Noh theater using centuries-old techniques. Following her graduation from Wellesley College, she received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship that enabled her to research Japanese artists who set out to study painting with the French Impressionists. Richman will delve into how she utilized all of these fascinating elements of her background in creating her first novel, which illuminates the emotional and often fraught experience of a young Japanese artist who defies his traditional Noh mask-carving father to pursue Western-style painting in Paris, exploring themes of art, family duty, and cultural identity during Japan's Meiji period. A book signing will follow the lecture.

Celebrate Morikami’s 50th Anniversary by delving into the history of this cultural institution through the lens of its first employee.

The Yamato Colony, founded by pioneer Jo Sakai in 1905, was a community of Japanese and later, Japanese-American settlers seeking to make their fortune in the frontier which was early 20th century South Florida. Never more than roughly fifty people including some white and Black settlers, most colonists left after selling their property during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. By World War II, thirteen people remained, soon to be displaced when the government acquired their land by eminent domain to build the Boca Raton Army Air Field. Learn about the myths and the truths surrounding the disposition of the colony based on historic documents and maps from the collections of the Boca Raton Historical Society.