Poster Life — In Memory of Kazumasa Nagai: Part 2

In the second Design Collection of the fiscal year, following the first installment, we are pleased to present a special memorial exhibition honoring the late graphic designer Kazumasa Nagai, who passed away on February 23, 2026, at the age of 96. The event features works from the museum's poster collection.
Kazumasa Nagai and the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design shared a long-standing relationship. From the opening of the former Museum of Modern Art, Toyama in 1981 until its closure in 2016, Nagai was responsible for designing posters for special exhibitions, the museum's mascot, Miruzo, and later the logo for the Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, which relocated to a new building in 2017. He also played a pivotal role in the museum's activities through his participation in Contemporary Japanese Posters (1982), the exhibition that became the foundation of the museum's poster collection, and through his extensive involvement as an executive committee member for the International Poster Triennial in Toyama: IPT, from the conceptualization stage in 1985 through the eleventh in 2017.
The Museum alone holds more than 250 posters designed by Kazumasa Nagai, yet these represent only a small part of a career spanning more than 70 years, beginning in the early 1950s. While this exhibition offers only a glimpse of his remarkable body of work, we hope visitors will experience Nagai's rich world of graphic design—and the profound reverence for all living things conveyed through it—via posters created for the Museum, commercial advertisements, pieces from his life’s work, the LIFE poster series, and his published collections.