AMABIKI 2015 Greeting

On behalf of all of the participating artists I would like to extend my greatest appreciation to Sakuragawa city in jointly hosting “The AMABIKI exhibition Rinrin Road” as part of their ten year anniversary.
The cooperation and hard work of city and prefectural supervisors and a great number of other people has led to where we are today. Thank you very much.
Sakuragawa city was established when the towns of Makabe, Yamato and Iwase merged in October, 2005. We decided to use this time of commemoration to try something new. After much deliberation and discussion we decided to hold the AMABIKI exhibition along the Rinrin Road that joins the former towns of Makabe, Yamato and Iwase, and here we are today at the opening of the AMABIKI exhibition.
Previous the AMABIKI exhibition were held in the former Yamato village district. An area was chosen for the exhibition and artists would then each decide where they wanted to install their works. Then, with the help of town office employees, the heads of local districts, and local residents, they had to gain permission from landowners to install works on their properties. After sites were decided, routes were worked out and signposts erected, as everyone went through the process of getting each exhibition up and running.
The subtitle of this exhibition is “Rinrin Road”, a road that runs from the Inuda intersection on the prefectural road 14 at the northern end, past the amabiki rest area, and down to the old Kabaho station at the southern end. Exhibits were restricted to the Rinrin Road area, and thus we have the current exhibition route.
Upon reflection, when the Amabiki exhibitions started back in 1996, there were no art galleries or museums, just an expansive rural landscape and it all started in the hope that the people of Sakuragawa city and the children who grew up here would see art and sculpture as a normal part of their surroundings and not as something special or out of the ordinary.
And now twenty years has passed and children who were born back then are about twenty years old. It is our dream that the years of Amabiki exhibitions have given these children of Sakuragawa a sense and awareness of art and sculpture.
The lastly but not least, I would like to extend a gratitude to the volunteer group Yamato-Nadeshiko-an who provided meals and a place to rest for exhibition visitors for many years. I would also like to appreciate everybody at Mirai Juku for getting the local junior high school students involved and planning the photo contest and workshop etc.
As well as the workshop itself, frottage rubbing materials were available near each work so that people could become a bit more familiar with each exhibit. The idea came about so that people would not only appreciate the different works, but also make their own frottage rubbings of exhibits as a moment of the exhibition. 　　　　　　　　

The AMABIKI exhibition Executive Committee
SUGAWARA Jiro