Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season.
Japan, Seattle, and Cleveland: Sherman E. Lee’s Collecting and Exhibitions of Chinese Art
Noelle Giuffrida
In the decades following World War II, international political, economic, and legal changes affected the art market, prompting a new wave of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art in the United States. Which individuals and institutions played major roles within international networks of dealers, collectors, and curators? Which Chinese works did postwar curators select for art museums, and why? Which tax and export laws impacted the global circulation of Chinese art in the 1940s through the 1970s?
This talk explores these questions by examining the activities of one of the most prominent figures of the postwar era: American curator and museum director Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008). Following his naval service in the Pacific theater, Lee worked as a monuments man in Occupied Japan. During his two-year stay, he had unprecedented access to study art in Japanese collections and developed an extensive network of personal and professional relationships with Japanese collectors, scholars, and museum officials. These experiences helped to shape his collecting and exhibitions of Chinese art during his years as curator and assistant director at the Seattle Art Museum (1948–52) and as curator and director of the Cleveland Museum of Art (1952–1983).
After the lecture, explore our Atsuhiko and Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Conservation Center and learn more about how Sherman E. Lee's lasting legacy as a curator at the Seattle Art Museum shapes the conservation work that SAM performs today.
Noelle Giuffrida's research focuses on Chinese art, particularly the history of collecting and exhibiting premodern works in American museums after World War II and the visual culture of Daoism in late imperial China. Her teaching and curatorial experience extend broadly both temporally—from Neolithic to contemporary—and cross-culturally to China, Korea, and Japan, as well as to South and Southeast Asia.
Her publications include the book Separating Sheep from Goats: Sherman E. Lee and Chinese Art Collecting in Postwar America (University of California Press, 2018) as well as articles and chapters in the Journal of Art Market Studies and Royal Taste: The Art of Princely Courts in 15th Century China. Recent curatorial projects include the special exhibition Fibers of Being: Textiles from Asia in the David Owsley Museum of Art’s Collection (2023). Giuffrida is Associate Professor of Art History at Ball State University. She earned her PhD in Asian art history from the University of Kansas. She previously served as Associate Curator of Asian Art at the David Owsley Museum of Art and taught in the graduate art history program at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
9:30 am
Doors Open
10-11:15 am
Lecture and Q+A with lecturer
11 am-noon
Tateuchi Conservation Center open to guests. No food or drink will be allowed inside the conservation center.