Golden Week 2019

The 20th Spiral Independent Creators Festival in Omotesando offers the season’s freshest creativity by emerging artists and designers, who staff a total of 150 booths in three two-day sessions. Check out everything from illustration to installation art and chat with the creators themselves. Every year SICF delivers wonderful and weird artistic inventions, and this year should be no exception. Visitors can vote for a favorite artist to be awarded an Audience Prize. The program has also been expanded to include a performance segment called “Play.” May 1–May 6. ¥200 admission discounts with the MuPon museum coupon app.

Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) was a master of American Realism and you can see 40 paintings from his ‘Olson House’ series depicting the poetic bleakness and valiant struggle of rural life at the Aizumi Art Museum in Shinjuku. Displays include a model of the Olson House and studies for “Christina’s World.” Ends May 19.

Ichihara, Chiba, about an hour outside of Tokyo by express bus, is the site of the chic and sunny Ichihara Lakeside Museum. It was also the home of Lady Sarashina, who penned a popular diary that has endured for a thousand years. Women Imagining Rooms: About the Diary of Lady Sarashina features work by 12 women artists and creative teams inspired by Lady Sarashina’s account of her life and times. Tomoko Konoike’s hand-sewn table runners depicting memorable moments in the lives of women in Akita and Ishikawa and Erika Kobayashi’s animated video diary interweaving wartime and family histories are among the highlights. Ends July 15. ¥100 off admission with MuPon. Transportation details here.

Joseph Cornell: Collage & Montage takes an extensive look at this 20th century artist known for his Surrealist collages and dioramas made with found objects. Cornell also produced films by splicing together scenes from other movies in addition to shooting his own footage. You can see excellent examples of both his films and his assemblages at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, which houses an impressive collection of European and modern American art, a Rothko Room, and an idyllic garden and strolling grounds about 1 hour by express bus from Tokyo. Through June 16. ¥200 admission discounts with MuPon. Transportation.

The seaside Yokosuka Museum of art, about 1.5 to 2 hours from Tokyo by train and bus, presents Sense of Scale. This showcase of some of Japan’s most innovative contemporary artists includes Tatsuya Tanaka’s clever miniatures made with ordinary objects, Takahiro Iwasaki’s suspended, scaled-down statues of shrines with their mirror images attached, and Taiji Matsue’s zoomed-out photographs of apartment blocks that make human dwellings resemble ant colonies. Until June 23. Transportation.

Takehito Koganezawa: Naked Theatre at Kanagawa Arts Theatre (KAAT) in Yokohama brings the inner workings of the theater to life. The exhibition makes full use of props and devices like stage lighting, sound equipment, and smoke machines, while the Asian Art Award-winning performance artist Takehito Koganezawa directs with a lineup including a talk, dance, music, and poetry. Through May 6. ¥100 admission discounts with MuPon.

Myth Machine is Miwa Yanagi’s first solo exhibition in a decade. Known for her photo series such as ‘Elevator Girl’ and ‘Grandmothers’ that blend reality, fantasy, and narrative, and for touring Kansai giving performances from a self-decorated theater truck, Yanagi now unveils new photographs inspired by Japanese mythology and peach trees from Fukushima. Through June 23. Arts Maebashi in Gunma can be reached by train from Tokyo in about 2 hours. Transportation.

Find more art events with the Tokyo Art Beat app.