TLP Interview with Dr. Rachel Saunders, Curator, Harvard Art Museums

The Lonely Palette

Arts, Podcast, Art, Museum, Painting, Modern Art, Visual Arts, Art History

4.8 • 857 Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2021

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Like so many of us, Dr. Rachel Saunders had a tough 2020. As the curator of Asian art at the Harvard Art Museums, she was thrilled to co-curate, with professor Yukio Lippit, the exhibition "Painting Edo: Japanese Art from the Feinberg Collection," the largest single exhibition the museum had ever mounted. And then, a month after its opening, it was shuttered by Covid, and remained closed until the entire exhibition came down early last month. But what could have been a bitter disappointment actually became exceptionally educational - perhaps par for the course at a prestigious university art museum, but with far-reaching implications for museums everywhere. Because when we talk about accessibility - and inaccessibility - in this context, we start to think about it in every context. How accessible are museums, ever? How cross-cultural are our conversations? How do art historians wrestle with and decide on narratives? And how do we honor the multiplicity of these objects' histories while still making them present, today? I sat down with Dr. Saunders this past May, the last month that the exhibition was still up on the gallery walls but still behind locked doors, and we dove into these issues and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When the exhibition Painting Edo opened at the Harvard Art Museums in February of 2020,
0:07.0	it was, as my dad likes to say, an event.
0:11.0	It wasn't just the largest single exhibition the museum had ever mounted,
0:16.0	showcasing a world-class collection of paintings from the Edo period in Japan,
0:20.0	which, if you know your history, lasted from around 1615 to 1868.
0:26.6	It was also really, really well done.
0:30.6	Which, when it comes to displaying both a donated gift,
0:35.6	and, moreover, explaining non-Western art to a largely Western audience,
0:41.7	well, it's a tough needle to thread. And I know how well they did it, because I was there,
0:48.6	that February, in the galleries, on assignment for the New York Review of Books. And as we moved through the galleries,
0:55.6	none of us had any sense that we were popping in for an hour to stroll among priceless deck
1:00.6	chairs on the Titanic. The exhibition closed a month later and stayed closed until the objects
1:07.7	came down at the beginning of June in 2021.
1:18.6	COVID took a lot from us, tangible, intangible, and I don't think it's trivial to count museum exhibitions and experiences among the losses.
1:25.6	But I also think it's important, as the pandemic recedes, at least where I am, at least right now,
1:33.3	that it gave us something to.
1:36.3	Specifically, all these museums that had been forced to close their doors for a year or more
1:42.3	learned a tough lesson in accessibility, and how
1:46.7	accessible these museums have always ever been, both to the communities they serve and to the
1:52.8	audiences who will never actually cross their thresholds.
1:57.0	And painting Edo in particular, and as we'll see, once it closed down,
2:01.6	offered a masterclass in what it means to organize an exhibition during our current moment,
	...

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