Matsumoto
Culture-Art-Promotion
Foundation

Children have boundless potential and sparkling sensibility. The Matsumoto Culture-Art-Promotion Foundation works to help foster that creativity.
You see the fruits of these efforts 10 or 20 years in the future, because they’re sustained and ongoing, so it’s important to continue over the long term. Fortunately, numerous teachers who are recognized as professionals in their fields support this mission.
We hope to continue our programs while pursuing exchanges with numerous stakeholders so that people will conclude that it's a good thing this foundation existed in Fukuoka.

As part of our core activities, we collect and manage exceptional works, capture them with computers to create digital images, and use them in future art education and the Internet Children’s Museum Fukuoka. Each year, we recognize a total of 1,000 works of art, including 834 Special Selection Prize-winning works from the Fukuoka Prefecture Elementary Students’ Painting Exhibition and 150 Special Prize- and Special Selection Prize-winning works from the Fukuoka Prefecture Young Children’s Painting Exhibition. In this way, we’re able to manage and store these paintings perpetually. The database is searchable, so, for example, a past Special Selection Prize recipient who’s since become a mother can, years in the future, easily show her painting to her own children. We're also able to host retrospective exhibitions by displaying original paintings organized by the elementary school that produced them. The database makes it possible for mothers to demonstrate timeless greatness and to excite and inspire children through paintings.

We’ve long entertained a vision for building a children’s museum, but we’ve concluded that hosting such a museum online will be a more realistic option in the future. Today, we’re working to speed up associated work while enhancing and improving the underlying system. We’ve placed part of the museum online so that the public can experience it. Schools, kindergartens, and other organizations can also make use of the museum via the Internet. We will also be able to make the museum’s artwork available to a global audience. Art knows no borders, so we look forward to these works of art gaining acceptance in various ways in other countries!

Articles of Incorporation (22.7 KB PDF)

We fund the Fukuoka Prefecture Elementary Students’ Painting Exhibition (which was held for the 66th time in FY2017), which is hosted by the Fukuoka Prefecture Elementary School Painting and Craft Educational Workshop , a long-running organization with a membership of elementary school drawing and craft teachers that has made a significant contribution to the cultivation of children's aesthetic sensibility and art education. Rich in tradition and prestige, this children’s painting exhibition counts as participants all students of national, public, and private elementary schools in Fukuoka Prefecture (who typically submit 270,000 works for consideration). The exhibition recognizes both individual artists and schools, and works recognized with a Special Selection Prize (834 works) are entrusted to the Foundation. We present three postcard-size prints of each work to Special Selection Prize recipients. In addition, the 16 schools that earn a School Prize receive a specially made bronze plaque entitled “Girl with Sunflowers.”

Reflecting our goals of boosting interest in children’s artistic expression, fostering expressive skills, and cultivating rich aesthetic sensibility from the standpoint of early childhood and elementary education, we support and provide operating funds for the Fukuoka Prefecture Young Children’s Painting Exhibition, a public exhibition hosted by the Fukuoka Prefecture Young Children’s Art Education Workshop (a group of currently serving kindergarten heads and experts in child art education) and The Nishinippon Shimbun. As of FY2017, the exhibition was the largest young children’s painting exhibition in Fukuoka Prefecture, attracting 5,500 submissions. The exhibition marked its 23rd year in FY2017. Judges chose 23 Special Prize- and 127 Special Selection Prize-winning works as well as 300 Selected Works from submissions. Of those, works receiving a Special Prize or Special Selection Prize are entrusted to the Foundation.

Since it began collecting artwork at the time of its establishment (1993), the Foundation has been loaning those works free of charge to kindergartens, elementary schools, and other public educational institutions in the prefecture by drawing on the works that it continues to collect each year (as of January 2017, the Foundation was managing a collection of more than 21,000 works).

Works of art in the Foundation’s collection are stored in an image database on its server and made available to a global audience through publication on the “Internet Children’s Museum Fukuoka” website. In addition to publication of artwork by program year, the website boosts convenience by providing school and individual search capability.