The National Museum of Asian Art Is an Institution in Flux

The National Museum of Asian Art is a complicated place. First opened to the public in 1923, the museum was founded by railroad businessman Charles Lang Freer with a donation of 10,000 Asian and American artworks and an endowment dedicated to the acquisition of “very fine examples of Oriental, Egyptian, and Near Eastern fine arts.” A century on from its founding, the NMAA showcases art and antiquities from China, Japan, Korea, India, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. That wide remit, the idiosyncrasy of its founding, and its location in a city which has half a dozen or more of the nation’s most visited tourist attractions present numerous challenges.

In 2020, the NMAA launched a five-year strategic plan to overcome these issues, as well addressing developing conversations around accountability, provenance, and accessibility. That plan was on full display last May, when the museum held a two-week festival to celebrate its centennial, featuring live discussions, local Asian food vendors, and performances. It held a similar, though shorter, series earlier this year, and has said it will do so in the future.

On a more long-term basis, the NMAA has tried to make its grand, early 20th century building more welcoming through the establishment of a flexible space in the center of its galleries for live activities geared towards ongoing community engagement. The museum has also significantly expanded its programming around cultural events like Ramadan, for which it paired a film screening with an iftar feast in early April, while also providing curator and docent-led tours and other more traditional art museum activities.

“It’s not just catering purely in terms of popular culture,” director Chase F. Robinson told ARTnews on a museum tour last year. “It’s also making sure that those popular points of entry into Asian culture really serve as gateways into our collection into understanding visual culture and understanding the arts of Asia more broadly.”

Robinson also pointed to the growth of the NMAA’s board of trustees in the last four to five years and how many of the new members were invited to join because they would advocate for, represent, and open up new audiences to the museum. As of June this year, the board now has 25 members, including former US Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, businessperson Isha Ambani, curator June Li, as well as actor and producer Mindy Kaling.

The NMAA’s efforts to increase community engagement and public awareness appear to be working. According to from the Smithsonian, over 500,000 people visited the museum last year, compared to a little over 360,000 in 2022, an increase of 43 percent. By comparison, the number of visitors to the nearby Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden fell 13.8 percent over the same period, despite the immense popularity of its Yayoi Kusama exhibition and a partnership with MTV for a reality competition television show.

A complicated origin story

While the NMAA’s programming may be admirably forward-thinking, less easily fixed in the unusual construction of the museum. The NMAA is actually comprised of two Smithsonian museums: the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

At its outset, the Freer Gallery’s collection most notably contained around 800 examples of Japanese ceramics, as well as over 1,000 artworks by American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. There is also, on permanent display, an entire elaborately decorated living space known as the Peacock Room. Designed by Whistler, it was originally in the London mansion of shipbuilder Frederick Leyland before it was moved to Freer’s home in Detroit. Freer stipulated in his donation that only objects from the permanent collection could be exhibited in the Freer gallery and that none of the art could be exhibited elsewhere. This created a problem, as the Peacock Room was designed to showcase a Chinese blue-and-white porcelain collection that the museum didn’t have. As a result, soon after Freer’s death, the museum’s acquisition’s committee purchased examples of such ceramics, and put them on display.

While the Whistler paintings and the Peacock Room are no doubt beautiful, their presence in a museum otherwise focused on Asian art exemplifies the confusing make-up of the collection.

“We’re not a museum about one person,” Jan Stuart, the museum’s Melvin R. Seiden Curator of Chinese Art told ARTnews after a tour of the institution’s collection of ceramics from the Song Dynasty. “We’re, I think, a museum about the ideals that were engendered by Freer. Somebody might say, it sounds hokey to talk about the high ideal of beauty. But it’s not hokey. You can interpret this in modern ways, too, because beauty is defined by each of us in our own way. But it is a concept we can all gravitate to.”

The Sackler Gallery meanwhile opened in 1987, after Arthur M. Sackler donated $50 million in Asian art and artifacts to the Smithsonian in 1982, along with $4 million to fund a holding institution. Sackler died four months before the opening of his namesake gallery adjacent to the Freer and eight years before the family’s pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma started selling OxyContin.

The museum rebranded in 2019 with its current name, the National Museum of Asian Art, though it told the Washington Post at the time that the change was not related to protests against the Sackler family and that each gallery legally retains their original names as well as on the building themselves.

Robinson said that prior to the new brand name, many people didn’t know the Smithsonian had a museum of Asian art, and that it was the first national art museum. “I think it’s a point of some pride that the first National Art Museum was given over mainly to Asian art. That’s something about an American commitment to internationalism.” 

Highlighting the best of its collection

The museum’s collection of 47,000 objects is large, but uneven, something Robinson said the institution was aware of and actively trying to address as the top goal of its current five-year strategic plan. Still, during a tour of several exhibitions for its centennial last May, curators proudly showed off never-before-seen Indian miniature paintings from Royal Udaipur and its small, but superb collection of Islamic artifacts. The latter included three 10th century inscribed banquet plates from what is now Uzbekistan.

The museum is in the midst of a five-year initiative called “The Arts of Devotion” aimed at increasing the public’s understanding of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam through exhibitions, activities, and educational outreach designed mainly for middle and high school students. Robinson called it an integrated attempt to speak to what interests different communities while leveraging the museum’s collections and expertise in those areas.

“It’s not just a matter of describing historical objects or their function in societies,” he said. “It’s as much interrogating the meeting that the meaning that contemporary Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus feel in in the objects that we have.”

A careful focus on future growth

One of the major goals in the museum’s current five-year plan has been to strategically grow and expand its collection, especially in modern and contemporary. Robinson acknowledged how much the NMAA depended on donations for new acquisitions on a 10 to 15-year timeline, and that the explosion in interest for Asian art had increased competition. But the NMAA director added that some of the 4,500 to 5,000 new objects acquired in the last five or six years were the result of more accelerated interest.

Robinson also said rather than focusing on competing with other museums over acquiring more objects, especially extraordinary and rare ones, the future was more about collaborating with other institutions and sharing in a more sustainable and efficient way. “I also say it because if the last 20 years, particularly the last three or four or five years, have taught us anything it’s to be that we’ve come to understand the political and financial and ethical dimensions of collecting in a new way,” he said.

One of those collaborations includes the museum’s recent announcement of Sunwoo Huang as its inaugural Korean Foundation Curator of Korean Art and Culture. Huang told ARTnews that she aims to expand the museum’s collection beyond its focus on ceramics and she will facilitate a major loan exhibition with the National Museum of Korea with 200 items from the family collection of former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee. “We haven’t had a large loan show like this in 30 years,” Hwang said.

It’s also worth noting that the NMAA’s work in provenance research includes the temporary custody of 80 artifacts repatriated to Yemen, including three from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Robinson told ARTnews last May that the institution was hesitant to exhibit any of the pieces, even though members of the Yemeni community had expressed interest in seeing them.

“The last thing we’d like to do is incentivize further looting,” Robinson said.

On January 13, a selection of the repatriated items were put on public display in the museum’s permanent exhibit on ancient Yemen, with labels written by Yemeni people and information on the looting and trafficking of artifacts from the country. Robinson said it was an example of the institution’s collaborations and public education efforts addressing questions about repatriation.

In the last several years, museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Denver Museum of Art have seen several claims of looted items and repatriated artifacts by other countries., Robinson said that the NMAA continued to have no outstanding claims as of July this year, but that the institution took any potential ones seriously and had a proactive approach to determining provenance under the UNESCO treaty and the Smithsonian’s shared stewardship and ethical returns policy.

“I do not doubt that in the not-too-distant future, the museum will be deploying that policy and working with foreign governments to address pieces that that are, if not legally, then ethically problematic or compromised,” Robinson said. “Because when you have a collection of our size, it’s almost certain that you come across objects that require that kind of scrutiny.”

Questions from visitors about the provenance of objects, as well as the NMAA’s own ongoing research and incorporation of item histories into exhibitions, has led to the museum turning down some collections that have been offered as donations.

“I think we need to be really transparent because of those object histories,” Robinson said, noting the NMAA’s 2020-2025 Plan did not include the word “provenance”, but the next one would.

Drawing connections and planning more celebrations

One testament to the NMAA’s ability to be excellent in spite of all of its challenges is a display case in its Islamic Arts wing showcasing two similarly-shaped canteens: a Chinese porcelain piece from the Ming Dynasty, and an elaborately decorated brass and silver one from Syria or Northern Iraq from the mid-13th century.

“Today, this is the only one in the world, there is not another one like it,” Massumeh Farhad, the NMAA’s Ebrahimi Family Curator of Persian, Arab, and Turkish Art and senior associate director for research, said about the latter. “This is such an odd and unusual shape, that you wouldn’t just come up with that. And we still haven’t quite figured out how this would have worked.”

Farhad, who has worked at the NMAA since 1995, called it “an amazing testimony to the connection of the different cultures.”

“We are the only place in the world where you can see this juxtaposition,” she said with a grin.

The museum aims to keep drawing new and repeat visitors to see those kinds of displays, largely in part through its ongoing cultural programming and a major expansion in community festival days. The museum saw around 15,000 people attend its Lunar New Year celebration in January; over 5,000 people attend Chuseok, the Korean mid-autumn harvest festival in September; and close to 9,000 people attend its first celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

Robinson said that visitors attending those events were “overwhelming” people of color in their 20s and 30s, many with small children, much younger and more diverse demographics compared to typical frequent museum-goers.

“Those are not just opportunities in which we educate visitors about Asian art and culture, but we celebrate Asian culture,” Robinson said, noting the events are in direct partnership with local and national Asian American community organizations like the Vietnam Society.

A museum exit survey in 2023 showed 31 percent of NMAA’s visitors were between the ages of 25 to 34, and 35 percent identified as Asian and Asian American.

By expanding the museum’s activities from an educational and research institution to these events, Robinson said he and his staff’s public celebrations and advocacy of Asian arts and culture tapped into a hunger for celebration, especially after the rise in anti-Asian hate and Sinophobia during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have this opportunity to which the nature of American society is also transformed and in which Asian communities are becoming American in part by celebrating their backgrounds,” Robinson said with a grin. “That’s so exciting. And it’s so different from the kind of orienting framework of our foundation.”