Collaborations

In 2023, the Omaha Symphony bestowed Jun and Ree Kaneko with the Dick and Mary Holland Leadership Award, in recognition of their extensive and exceptional contributions to the arts. Wishing to honor the Kanekos on this important occasion, the Symphony set out to work with Jun and Ree to select a composer to create a suite of new music inspired by Jun’s work. And so, in the spring of 2022, the search for a composer began.

The Omaha Symphony presented several candidates to Jun and Ree, and they found that Andy Akiho, an award-winning percussionist and classical composer, was a natural fit. “The inspiration started from day one,” says Akiho. Over the course of a year, Akiho took up residency in a studio loft to engage directly with Jun and his staff. Akiho worked day and night in Kaneko’s studio, turning the artist’s Dangos, Heads, and Columns into unique percussion instruments. As he experimented with sound, Akiho and Kaneko found mutual inspiration in each other’s work, and Kaneko gave Akiho carte blanche to use the sculptural forms as instruments.

Andy Akiho, Omaha Symphony
2023

While teaching at Cranbrook Academy of Art as Head of the Ceramics department, Jun Kaneko was pondering a crucial determination that all artists must consider: completion. More specifically, he wondered: How does one know when a work or a design is finished?  Kaneko relies on his intuition, yet he contemplated what would happen if he relinquished control over when to stop and when to continue.

This query resulted in an unlikely collaboration with the young daughter of a colleague at Cranbrook. The little girl, aged three, was named Ana, and Kaneko gave Ana the power to decide when their jointly created compositions were complete. Ana came to Jun’s studio every weekend, and together they created drawings, a stack of fresh Fabriano Artistico cotton paper at the ready. He recalls, “I made a rule. When she said, ‘new paper,’ no matter what, I had to stop and change the paper. We did that for two-and-a-half years, every Saturday. At one point a drawing might look really good to me, so I would try to trick her into saying, ‘new paper,’ but she wouldn’t say it. She kept on working on it, and I started seeing how it was changing. Then it became much better than at the point when I thought we should be finished. That’s when I had an opportunity to see beyond the finishing point.”

Untitled, Drawing
1984-86

In 1981, British ceramicist Tony Hepburn was one of the first artists invited to a summer workshop called “Artists in Industry” sponsored by The Ree Schonlau Gallery in Omaha, Nebraska. Hepburn, who was then teaching at Alfred University, accepted the invitation to this Alternative Worksite Program, which was held at the industrial site of Omaha Brickworks. The Artists in Industry initiative was founded by Ree Shonlau, now Ree Kaneko, and was aimed at promoting artists’ access to industrial worksites, such as the enormous kilns at Omaha Brickworks, where Jun Kaneko created his first monumental Dangos. Schonlau’s program would later evolve into the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, with Tony Hepburn, Ree Schonlau, Jun Kaneko, and Lorne Falk all co-founding the arts center. Today the Bemis Center continues to provide residencies and exhibitions to artists from around the world. From 1981 to 2024 over one thousand artists have been awarded residencies and support from the Bemis.

Convergent Territories
1982