The transient beauty of a Japanese teacher’s chalkboard masterpieces
High school teacher Hirotaka Hamasaki, known on instagram and twitter as @hamacream, has been going viral for the remarkable chalk drawings he creates for his students. Every day, he uses chalk to painstakingly create intricate drawings, either faithfully reproducing known masterpieces or capturing the likeness of his students’ favorite characters. The pictures of his work are impressive, to say the least, but after photographing his creations and letting them be admired for a little, he simply erases them.
It seems crazy that someone could spend so much time creating something so beautiful only to wipe it away. While his drawings live on in their digital form, delighting millions of people on the internet, the people who he creates for are his students, and he erases each piece so that he can greet them with something new the following day. It’s remarkably moving.
In the digital age, art is not subject to the forces of nature that will inevitably cause its decay; it is preserved in the form of NFTs so that it will outlive us all. Mr. Hamasaki’s work shows the other extreme. Chalk is of the most ephemeral of substances and even blowing on it will affect how it looks. More than that, he creates these pieces knowing that they must be erased soon after. Their purpose is not to last, but to momentarily inspire and captivate his students.
Brown’s Percent-for-Art program has thoughtfully integrated site-specific public art onto campus since 2004. In honor of the 20th anniversary of this program, I sat down with the former director and artists involved to reflect on some of the program’s diverse projects and to gain insight into their perspectives on public art at Brown and beyond.
Responding to the tense familial relations in Tina Barney’s "Jill and Polly in the Bathroom" and Larry Sultan’s "My Mother Posing for Me."
By examining various historical and cultural practices in regards to fashion, textiles, and fabric-making, Chloe discusses the different ways fiber arts express community and identity in material or design choices.