SISON GALLERy Joint Exhibition – Drawings by Alicia Bay Laurel and Ceramics by Yoko Hijioka

The joint exhibition of my drawings and the beautiful ceramic vessels of Yoko Hijioka at SISON GALLERy in Daikanyama, Shibuya, Tokyo has just opened!

Here is the page on SISON GALLERy’s website about the show.

Fabulous fashion designer and artist Aya Noguchi, the owner and director of SISON GALLERy, kindly took these photos sent them to me!

If you are in Japan, please come and see our show!

The address of SISON GALLERy is:

3-18 Sarugaku-cho
Shibuya-ku
Tokyo
150-0033

Here is a link to the SISON GALLERy Facebook page.

This slip-cast ceramic Hanukkah menorah was designed by my late mother,Verna Lebow Norman. After she passed on, I found ten bisque fired and unglazed copies of the menorah on the shelves next to her kiln, plus a big container of shiny white glaze.

Thanks to my friend since infancy, Benida Solow, who is also a ceramic artist with a kiln at home, I was able to glaze all of the menorahs white, and then illustrate them with overglaze paint – each one is unique.

The menorah depicts a Jewish family – left to right: mother holding baby, grandfather, father, grandmother, little girl and little boy. My mother designed and had the brass wine goblet-shaped candle holders made for her menorahs.

On the wall behind is a framed original page layout from Living on the Earth, surrounded by a white mat board that I illustrated with line drawings. Yuji Kamioka, a wood craftsman, made one-of-a-kind driftwood frames for the Living on the Earth page layouts.

A drawing I made for the cover of the program notes for an elaborate “new age” production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest staged on Maui, Hawaii in 1976. It was also silk screen printed onto the cast’s t-shirts.

In 1978, when Michael Fleck’s marvelous script was published as a book, I made a color overlay for the drawing to print on the book cover, and about a dozen ink line illustrations interspersed with the text of the play.

The nude woman standing in water is an ink line drawing I made in the 1970s.

Here’s the book cover.

Inside SISON GALLERy, tables full of elegant ceramic vessels made by Yoko Hijioka, all watched over by one of the nine cats I drew as possible covers for Yoshimoto Banana’s novel Another World. This cat did not make the book cover, but artist Kei Tsunoda requested a giant canvas print of it from me a few years ago, and I decided to produce more of them.


Here is the hardcover edition of Another World:

And here is the paperback edition:

Quite a few of the original (created in 1969 and 1970 at Wheeler Ranch commune in northern California) hand-lettered page layouts with drawings from Living on the Earth are also hanging in the show, in custom driftwood frames created by craftsman Yuji Kamioka. In preparation for the first of the exhibitions of these works in Japan, in 2008, I illustrated a number of white matboards to add visual richness to the frames and the original works.