Details | Register here. Childe Hassam’s 1909 painting The Chinese Merchants pictures Chinatown in Portland, Oregon. The work is unusual both for Hassam, who typically created idyllic views of New England, and for Charles Lang Freer, who collected American and Asian art but who only ever purchased this one view of contemporary Asian American life. In The Chinese Merchants, Hassam creates a flattened, stage-like space with an array of darkened doors and windows that suggests a bustling commercial and domestic life largely inaccessible to both painter and viewer. This talk explores how Hassam, as a white artist from the East Coast, represented the neighborhood. Comparing Hassam’s efforts with other artists who took up the subject of Chinatown neighborhoods throughout the country, we recognize the development of a particular lexicon for envisioning Asian enclaves in American cities. This talk also explores how The Chinese Merchants entered Freer’s collections and what role it has served alongside the collector’s grouping of American Tonalist painting and Chinese antiquities. Diana Greenwold is the Lunder Curator of American Art and specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fine and decorative arts. She is particularly interested in stories of transnational exchange and the ways objects carry and transform culture. From 2014 to 2021, Diana served in various curatorial positions, ultimately as curator of American art at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. Her recent exhibitions include Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (2020) and In the Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950–69 (2018). Greenwold also spearheaded the multi-stage reinterpretation of the Winslow Homer Studio. This talk is part of the monthly lunchtime series Sneak Peek: New Research from the National Museum of Asian Art, where staff members present brief, personal perspectives and ongoing research, followed by discussion. This year, the series focuses on collecting practices and the collections of the National Museum of Asian Art. Image: The Chinese Merchants, Childe Hassam, 1909, oil on canvas, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Freer Gallery of Art, F1910.22a–b |
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