Asia and the New World: Global Exchange and Artistic Influence in the Colonial Americas, 1500-1800

FAIN: GE-50490-11

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston, MA 02115-5523)
Dennis Carr (Project Director: January 2011 to February 2013)

Planning for a traveling exhibition, a catalog, new media interpretive materials, and public programs about the impact of trade with Asia on artistic production in North, Central, and South America from 1500 to 1800.

Asia and the New World: Global Exchange and Artistic Influence in the Colonial Americas, 1500–1800 is a major travelling exhibition and ambitious research project being organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Curated by Dennis Carr, Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, the exhibition will be showcased at the MFA from April 6, 2014, through July 27, 2014. The MFA is finalizing plans with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to co-organize the exhibition and to serve as a second venue from September 14, 2014, to January 4, 2015. The MFA is seeking a third venue in the U.S. or Mexico. The project will include a scholarly catalogue and a range of new media interpretive materials and public programs to reach a broad audience. Audiences will come away from Asia and the New World with the understanding that the products of civilization, like the world‘s peoples, are interrelated and intimately connected.

Associated Products

Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia (Catalog)
Title: Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia
Author: Dennis Carr, Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture, MFA
Author: Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair, Southern Baroque, Queen's Univ
Author: Timothy Brook, Republic of China Chair, Dept. of History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Author: Mitchell Codding, Executive Director, The Hispanic Society of America, New York
Author: Karina H. Corrigan, H.A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art, Peabody Essex Museum
Author: Donna Piece, Frederick & Jan Meyer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum
Abstract: Made in the Americas reveals the largely overlooked history of the profound influence of Asia on the arts of the colonial Americas. Beginning in the sixteenth century, European outposts in the New World, especially those in New Spain, became a major nexus of the Asia export trade. Craftsmen from Canada to Peru, inspired by the sophisticated designs and advanced techniques of these imported goods, combined Asian styles with local traditions to produce unparalleled furniture, silverwork, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, painting, and architectural ornaments. Among the exquisite objects featured in this book, from across the hemisphere and spanning the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, are folding screens made in Mexico, in imitation of imported Japanese and Chinese screens; blue-and-white talavera ceramics copied from Chinese porcelains; luxuriously woven textiles, made to replicate fine silks and cottons from China and India; devotional statues that adapt Buddhist gods into Christian saints; and japanned furniture produced in colonial Boston that simulates Asian lacquer finishes. The stories these objects tell, compellingly related by leading scholars, bring to life the rich cultural interchange and the spectacular arts of the first global age.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/made-in-the-americas-the-new-world-discovers-asia/oclc/910858950&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: World Cat
Secondary URL: http://www.mfa.org/collections/publications/made-in-the-americas
Secondary URL Description: MFA exhibition catalogue website
Catalog Type: Exhibition Catalog
Publisher: MFA Publications

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