BonusEp 0.5 - Tamar Avishai interviews Dr. Rachel Saunders, Harvard Art Museums

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 authentically
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 up on the gallery walls but still behind locked
doors, and we dove into these issues and more. See the images
discussed: https://bit.ly/3kQbAii Music used: The Blue Dot
Sessions, “One Little Triumph,” “Sage the Hunter” Tamar’s
exhibition review in the New York Review of Books:
https://bit.ly/36X64Cg The Lonely Palette episode on Painting Edo:
https://bit.ly/3iEFl2Q The HAM page on Painting Edo
https://bit.ly/3zrYBY7 Support the show!
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