Mighty Meji Metals: Sculpture from 19th Century Japan

Saturday, August 28, 2010 - Sunday, June 12, 2011

In 1867 an alliance of Japanese warlords staged a coup d’etat.  In a time of flourishing urban populations and the real power of the merchant class, they recognized the weakness in their antiquated feudal government and feared potential aggression by foreign powers.  Committed to reform, they ousted the Tokugawa Shogun, and returned central authority to the Imperial line. The young emperor, only 15, and living in relative poverty in Kyoto was moved to Edo, and the city was renamed Tokyo to mark the new era.  Backed by a powerful oligarchy, the emperor set a course for Japan as a modern industrialized nation state on an international stage. The emperor called his new reign period, 1868-1911, Meiji (Enlightened Government.) 

The confidence of Japan’s new nationalistic identity in the Meiji era is displayed in this small exhibition of outstanding works of art drawn from the Crow Collection: three imposing bronze sculptures over four feet in height, a dramatic carved and lacquered wood screen ornamented with precious metals, and ceramics and enamelware draped in liquid gold.

Meiji style aims for sensational effects: pictorial themes, drawn from Japanese history and mythology (with links to China) are vivified with realism and hyper-detail. Casting techniques are complex and daring.  Ceramics flush with color and gold.  An association of Japanese art with patience and consummate skill is firmly imprinted. 

Five Colors: Chinese Cloisonne Vessels on Loan from the Mandel Collection

Saturday, August 28, 2010 - Sunday, June 12, 2011

A dozen monumental cloisonné vessels that fit the imperial model made during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties are on view in the exhibition Five Colors:  Chinese Cloisonné Vessels on Loan from a the Mandel Collection.

Cloisonné is a process of inserting colored enamel pastes into a network of cells, or “cloisons” that rise above a metal ground.  The cells are formed by bending wire, usually copper, and soldering it to a metal surface, usually bronze or copper.  Enamel paste is made by tinting glass with metal oxides and grinding it to a paste. The decorated object is then fired at a low temperature in a “muffle” kiln, and the enamel fuses to the body without loss of placement or color. Gold liberally applied to designs creates even more brilliance. Take a Connoisseur’s Checklist provided in the galleries along with you as you view the exhibition and judge the quality of these works for yourself. 

In cases adjacent to the large cloisonné vessels on long-term loan to the Crow Collection, an instructive array of objects from the Collection is assembled to demonstrate various uses of enamel in the Chinese decorative arts.  Here you will find enamel as coloration for a porcelain monochrome; in pictures and patterns painted on ceramics--under and over the glaze; as inlay into metal, and in designs painted on metal in imitation of more costly cloisonné and enamel techniques.

Black Current: Mexican Responses to Japanese Art, 17th -19th Centuries

Saturday, September 18, 2010 - Sunday, January 02, 2011

Celebration in 2010 of the bi-centennial of Mexico’s independence (1810) and the centennial of her Revolution (1910) presented an occasion to explore the rich and sometimes overlooked contact between Asia and Mexico in the centuries following the exploits of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and Hernan Cortés.

As “The Viceroyalty of New Spain” between 1521and 1821, Mexico was a strategic player in a network of trade linking Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Silver, insects, and friars went west to Asia on galleons following the equatorial currents, and the same galleons returned on a northern easterly current called by the Japanese Kuroshio or the “Black Current.”  Headed to Mexico, were silks and other textiles (raw and worked), dyestuffs, gemstones, ceramics, ivories, medicines, woods, furniture including screens and boxes, cutlery, armor, and animals.

The Crow Collection was eager to bring together an exhibition that was inspired by a specific cultural thread in Asia and had an enduring cultural imprint in Mexico.  The exhibition took shape in two dimensions that seemed to point to direct inspiration from Japan—two pictorial formats—folding screens and rolled paintings--and the use of shell inlay on dark ground.  The inlaid objects are frames and borders made to look like lacquer, furniture using a local varnish called “barniz de pasto,” and paintings known in Mexico as enconchados—“incorporating shell.”  While each of these objects suggests direct exposure to Japanese works of art, even they exhibit degrees of inspiration that range from pure quotation, to local equivalencies, to autonomous flights of distinctive Mexican cultural identity. 

Visitors are invited to follow this inquiry into Mexican responses to Japanese art in approximately 25 objects gathered from collections in Mexico and the United States. 

Tibet: The Land Closest to the Sky, Photography by Marc Riboud

Saturday, October 02, 2010 - Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Crow Collection presents Tibet- The Land Closest to the Sky,  Photographs by Marc Riboud, the first solo exhibition in Texas of one of photography’s most original and influential masters. Curated by Selina Ting, the exhibition presents Marc Riboud’s work in Tibet- photographs in color and black and white taken in 1985. More than two thirds of the photographs are previously unknown to the public. Also included is a collection of personal souvenirs and objects such as the photographer’s Leica camera, letters from his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson, souvenirs from travelling, and more.

It was the passion to see and to photograph small pieces of the world that brought Marc Riboud to Tibet, and not to testify. Riboud has never claimed to exert any social role or seek any truth. In his words, “photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it is changing.” His photographs of Tibet, taken before the ethnic submersion, speak of politics, religions, morals, culture, but above all, people. A single image blends everything together: faces, costumes, landscapes, buildings, shrines and, more secretly, ideas and dogmas. They move and inform us, resonating in time and space long after. Riboud has never given himself any mission or constraints. He hates labels as much as he hates dissertations on a process that is for him an instinct more than a discipline. “Taking pictures is like savoring life at 125^th of a second…It is the instinct of the instant and the instant of the instinct,” says the photographer.