Freer and Sackler Galleries: A focus on Asian art
A smaller section of the National Mall houses the exquisite collections in the Freer Gallery and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. The museums don't have the same pomp and circumstance as the other Smithsonian museums, such as the Air & Space Museum, but its collections of Chinese and Asian fine arts continue to impress visitors who tour the galleries.
Both galleries were independent gifts from Charles Lang Freer and Arthur M. Sackler. The Freer gallery opened in 1923 in a marble-and-granite Italian renaissance style gallery especially built with funds from Freer. Sackler's gallery opened in 1987, after his death. Both galleries feature original collections from the two donors, plus thousands more pieces contributed to the museums by others. The two are connected by an underground exhibition hallway.
The Freer gallery features art from China, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, and the Near East. Favorites include the Peacock Room, a dining room from a London townhouse featuring blue and gold peacock design. Throughoug the Freer gallery are also Japanese and Chinese folding screens, Chinese , Japanese and Korean paintings, Buddhist sculpture, Indian and Persian manuscripts and Korean ceramics. In the Sackler gallery, early Chinese bronzes and jades, paintings and lacquerware are on display, along with ancient Near Eastern ceramics and metalware, sculpure from South and Southeast Asia, Islamic arts, contemporary Japanese and Chinese porcelain, and even photography.
For those where the Orient, particularly the old Orient, may seem extremely foreign and almost from another planet, the museum offers tours to help familiarize and educate visitors about the arts and culture of Asian countries. To make the visit to the great Orient more interactive, the museums offers an Imaginasia Family Program” which allows families to tour the gallery while using an activity book to explore the exhibition. In the end, kids take home an art project.
Many exhibitions are on loan from museums around the world. Currently, there are bronze statues from Angkor Wat, from the National Museum of Cambodia, ceramics from southern Japan, and perspectives from a Chinese artist named Hai Bao. Many pieces from the two galleries are also loaned out toe other museums. There's also an online exhibit, which allows you to look at the art from the galleries on the Web, and you can then choose to see them in person yourself.
Posted by Rin-rin Yu
