A little holiday travel cheer

The holidays are upon us and that means one thing — many hours spent braving the timeless monotony of airport terminals. But for those of you flying through San Francisco International Airport this season, we’ve got a special treat for your weary eyes. You see, there is a little project that we’ve been working on behind-the-scenes.

Jades await condition checking at the San Francisco Airport Museums

Beginning the week of Christmas, the San Francisco Airport Museums (yes, the airport has a fully-accredited museum) will host The Resplendent Stone: Chinese Jades from the 18th-20th Centuries. Drawn from the Asian Art Museum’s extensive jade collection, this is the first of several exhibitions to be produced by the San Francisco Airport Museums with loans from the Asian Art Museum.
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Have you taken your daily tour?

Museum staff enjoy a tour of Emerald Cities with curator Dr. Forrest McGill.

This past Friday, Chief Curator Forrest McGill took the staff of the Asian Art Museum on a tour of Emerald Cities. Such staff tours are a bit of a tradition after each exhibition opening — with all the busy schedules around here it can be surprising hard to find time to actually look at the art!
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Orchids: A Tribute to Doris Duke

As if Emerald Cities wasn’t glitzy enough, we’ve go a little extra eye candy for visitors attending opening week festivities. For one week only, the Asian Art Museum is presenting Orchids: A Tribute to Doris Duke. Doris Duke, who collected many of the works on view in Emerald Cities, was also a great lover of orchids. In her honor, we’ve invited floral designers from around the bay area to each create a display of these tropical beauties in the museum’s North and South Courts. These striking arrangements will be on view this week through Sunday October 25.  Enjoy them while they last!

An Emerald Cities teaser

While wandering the museum this week, you may notice lots of activity on the ground floor outside of our special exhibition galleries. Although the majority of Emerald Cities activity is happening behind screens and closed doors — accessible only to exhibition staff — we do have a small teaser in the works. Two metal sculptures from the show will visibly grace North Court starting this week. 
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Goodbye Samurai

It’s time to send-off another wonderful exhibition. For all of us, the fourteen week run of Lords of the Samurai has felt remarkably short. Compared to the years of work that go into organizing an exhibition of this scale, and the centuries of history represented by the works within, these few weeks are but an instant.

Objects wait for a final condition check before packing

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Countdown to Emerald Cities

Putting together a major art exhibition is not a quick process, with the planning for most shows starting years in advance. But no matter how ahead we begin work, the final two months before an exhibition opens will always be crunch time.

Emerald Cities does not debut until October 23, but its installation is complicated by the concurrent deinstallation of Lords of the Samuari (ending September 20). This is not atypical — we try and keep the turn around time (or “dark time”) between exhibitions as short as possible. Since these two exhibitions share many of the same behind-the-scenes staff, the result is a whole lot of people running around with brains and workspaces messily split between Japan and Southeast Asia.

So here are a few pics of this ongoing mayhem, as museum staff work to complete as much Emerald Cities prep as possible before jumping into packing up Lords of the Samurai.

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Wearable Art

A peek behind-the-scenes at Emerald Cities:  Chief Curator Forrest McGill and Textile Conservator Denise Migdail examine a partially completed costume mount. With the help of museum preparation staff, Denise has designed and built this diminutive torso and a set of elaborately cut rigid supports (only one is shown here) to show off an embroidered and sequined nineteenth-century Burmese court costume.

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The Museum of Asian Puppetry

Within the registration department, we sometimes like to joke that we are really the Museum of Asian Puppetry. With boxes and boxes of puppets lining our art storage areas, it certainly seems that way! Altogether, the museum owns close to 500 puppets and related theatrical arts. Almost half of these are Indonesian rod puppets (wayang golek) from The Mimi and John Herbert Collection (a rotating selection from this collection is permanently on view in our Southeast Asia gallery). In addition, the collection includes numerous puppets from China, Thailand, and Burma.

Given this notable collection, we were recently thrilled to be offered a full set of Javanese shadow puppets that have been tucked away in their original traveling trunk since before World War II. Now we normally don’t showcase new gifts until they have completed our lengthy and deliberate acquisitions process (a topic for another post some day), but because it will be a long time before we finish processing this gift and because they are just that cool, I thought a sneak peek might be in order.

This vast layer of shadow puppets is only the second of seven layers tightly packed into this trunk.

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Lords of the Samurai, Round 2

With our presentation of Lords of the Samurai approaching the halfway point, museum staff are busy preparing for a complex rotation in which nearly sixty objects will be removed from the galleries and replaced with a second selection of artwork.  This weekend will be the last chance to see the full first set of objects before this process begins. (The remaining fifty or so objects currently on view—including the six suits of armor and all of the sword blades—will stay on view for the entire exhibition).

Just as with our regular gallery rotations, we rotate objects because they are light-sensitive. The list of sensitive objects includes paintings, textiles, lacquers, and most other objects composed of organic materials. However, a mid-point special exhibition rotation differs slightly from our permanent gallery rotations because the new objects have to fit into the existing thematic content and flow of the exhibition. With so many unique works on view, this can make object selection a little bit tricky.

Portrait of Hosokawa Shigekata (left) will be replaced with a Portrait of Hosokowa Tsunatoshi (right). When possible, we try and rotate objects of similar type, function, and subject. © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

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Korean Palaces of the Joseon Dynasty

Ceramics, bronzes, screens, and scrolls —- these are the sorts of objects that probably come to mind when picturing the galleries of the Asian Art Museum. However, there are many more artistic mediums out there for our curators to explore. One such medium is photography, represented in our latest rotation by portraits of the lost palaces of Korea’s Joseon dynasty.

As mentioned in a previous post, we routinely remove light-sensitive works from our galleries and replace them with new works from storage. In this case, the contemporary fiber arts that have livened up our Korean gallery for the past year have been replaced by a selection of photographs from the vast archives of the National Museum of Korea.

The Hall of Diligent Rule at the Palace of Great Felicity, approx. 1909-1945; printed 2009, National Museum of Korea

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