Alice Kiwako Ashiwa

Alice Kiwako Ashiwa is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern Japanese art, with an interest in the relationship between patronage or institutuional support and avant-garde art, as well the overlaps between "tradition," "modern," and "avant-garde." Her dissertation examines the complex entanglments between ikebana [flower arrangment] and avant-garde art in the mid-twentieth century through the Sogetsu Art Center, a hub of postwar avant-garde art in Tokyo. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College in Anthropology and an M.A. in Modern and Contemproary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow (2021-2022) and affiliated with Sophia University in Tokyo.