Notes from Jinny

Hello fellow walkers and art lovers—

It has been a little while since our last dispatch. The streets and the gallery have kept moving, even while this newsletter was quiet.

We’re changing that. From now on, we’ll send regular notes from the street through this mailing list: exhibitions, walks, gatherings, open calls, and whatever else is happening around Jinny. Thank you for still being here and for walking with us.

Notes from Jinny

From Friday, August 28, Jinny Street Gallery presents Notes from Jinny, a participatory exhibition created by 25 artists and creatives selected through an open call.

Each participant took a Jinny Notebook and walked through Jingumae 2-chome, paying attention to whatever caught their eye: power lines crossing an alley, the color or shape of a building, something outside a shop, a conversation, a memory, or an idea that appeared while walking.

They walked the same neighborhood. What they brought back is completely different.

Some notebooks are filled with sketches and drawings. Others hold words, observations, fragments, and small discoveries. Together, the 25 notebooks offer 25 different ways of reading the neighborhood—and an invitation to look again at streets we may think we already know.

The completed notebooks will be displayed in Jinny Street Gallery’s streetlamp cases. Peek into someone else’s notes, then keep walking and see if the neighborhood begins to shift.

The Jinny Notebook

The notebook itself started in the neighborhood.

Its tall, narrow shape echoes Jinny’s streetlamp cases, while its cover carries a letterpress-printed map of Jingumae 2-chome. A small circular window offers a glimpse of the first page.

Before each notebook was handed to an artist, that first page was stamped with a texture gathered directly from the neighborhood—an impression taken from a building, a patch of street, a tree, or another small surface found nearby.

So every notebook already carried a physical trace of Jingumae before the first drawing, word, or memory was added.

The street started the work. The artists carried it forward.

We’ll also be making the Jinny Notebook available through our online store very soon, so you can take one on your own walk and record what you notice. We’ll announce its release in the next dispatch.

Exhibition & Opening Event

• Exhibition: Friday, August 28–Friday, September 25, 2026
• Location: Jinny Street Gallery, 2-31-5 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo
• Opening Event: Saturday, August 29, from 18:00
• Opening location: NININI·NI, 2-3-23 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo

Join us at NININI·NI for an evening of talks, drinks, food, and time with the community. We’ll share further event details on Instagram.

Learn more about Notes from Jinny

Take your time. Walk between the notebooks and the places that inspired them. See what somebody else noticed—and what you notice next.

A Small Note from Toto

Some of our regular walkers may have noticed that Toto hasn’t been at quite as many Jinny events in Tokyo lately. There is a reason: he is preparing to move away from Japan in 2027.

He will remain involved with the gallery—just a little more behind the scenes. In fact, Toto wrote the message you’re reading right now. Hello! 👋

You’ll still see him in Tokyo from time to time, though less frequently than before. The move is also opening a new path for Jinny: we’ve begun exploring how the gallery might grow beyond Tokyo and into Europe.

Something may already be brewing around Rome. Keep an eye on these dispatches. We hope to have more to share sometime in 2027.

As always, see you around the hood,

—Toto, Lorenzo and The Jinny Team