2023 DANO-SPRING FESTIVAL

The Gateway Korea Foundation invites you to join us for the DanO Korean Spring Festival presented in partnership with the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri Humanities and with support from the Missouri Humanities Trust Fund. The DanO program will include a lecture, "Power to the Women: Art of Korean Embroidery" by Sooa Im McCormick, curator of Korean art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following the lecture will be a preview of the Saint Louis Art Museum's upcoming Nigerian Textile Exhibition presented by Shaka K. Myrick, SLAM's Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow and a co- curator of the upcoming exhibition "Aso Oke Prestige Cloth from Nigeria". The festival will also include a dance performance by Janet Park, performance artist and GKF board member.

Full Lecture

GALLERY

**SOOA IM MCCORMICK**

Sooa Im McCormick is Curator of Korean Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She holds a PhD from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree from Rutgers University. After joining the Cleveland Museum of Art, she curated a number of special exhibitions including *Playbook for Solitude* (2021), *Gold Needles: Korean Embroidery Arts* (2020), and *Chaekgeori: Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens* (2017). She is currently working on multiple curatorial projects including *Persistence and Subversion in Korean Couture* (2024) and *Ten Kings of Hell and the Beyond* (2026).

While pursuing her curatorial career, Dr. McCormick remains active as a cutting-edge scholar who investigates the intersections between art, ecology, and politics.
Her publications include “Re-Reading the Imagery of Tilling and Weaving of Eighteenth-Century Korean Genre Painting in the Context of the Little Ice Age,” in *Anthology of Mountains and Rivers (without) End: Eco-Art History in Asia* (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019) and “The Politics of Frugality: Environmental Crisis and Eighteenth-Century Korean Visual Culture,” in *Forces of Nature* (Cornell University Press, 2022).

**SHAKA MYRICK**

Shaka Myrick earned her master’s degree in art history from the University of Missouri–Kansas in 2021 after curating “Real Black,” the first exhibition featuring all Black artists at the UMKC Gallery of Art. Since her appointment as the inaugural 2-year (2021-2023) Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow, she’s completed many projects focused on increasing the visibility of works by Black artists in the Print, Drawing, and Photographs department. She also has a vested interest in the history of West Africa textiles and their impact on contemporary art. From this research she will co-curate an exhibition highlighting Yoruba Aso-oke (ah-sho-kay) textiles, opening September 2023 at the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Shin, Yun-Bok

Dano (端午, May 5th of the lunar calendar) is one of the major traditional festivals in Korea along with Sŏrnal (New Years Day, lunar calendar) and the harvest festival Ch’usŏk (August 15th, lunar calendar). Dano usually falls in early to mid June as measured on the solar calendar, a moment when spring turns into summer and when yang energy is at its peak. It represents a significant turning point in agriculture when farmers have just finished seeding and planting. The day thus marks the beginning of the growing season.

Celebrating May 5th by the lunar calendar is a shared tradition among East Asian countries, but the activities differ widely. The Korean celebration includes traditional outdoor and indoor activities including swinging, wrestling, making special cakes containing spring herbs, washing hair with balsam, and giving gifts of fans for use in the coming summer.

The tradition appears in some well-known art works from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910): in the eighteenth century painting by Shin Yun-bok, and in the “Story of Ch’unhyang”, a famous love story circulated both through written text and through an oral performance tradition called p’ansori.