Benevolence and Wisdom: New Gifts from the Collection of Trammell and Margaret Crow

The Crow Collection of Asian Art began not as a public museum, but as a private collection fueled by Trammell and Margaret Crow, who made more than twenty trips to Asia over thirty years.  Their Asian art collection began with a single piece of Chinese jade acquired in 1971.  This luminous material and the works of art carved from it became the heart of the collection along with other artworks in porcelain, ivory, lacquer, and metals that illustrate and embody Asian art, history, religion and culture.  This exhibition features the most recent works of art donated to the Museum at the bequest of Margaret Doggett Crow (1919-2014).  Highlights of this final gift to the Museum include fine examples of Asian export porcelain, jade vessels with delicately carved auspicious imagery, and Japanese ivorynetsuke.  As a collection, these works tell stories from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century, including the interweaving of Daoist, Shinto, Buddhist, and folk traditions with the worlds of Qing dynasty Confucian scholars, Edo period merchants, and the collector’s eye for quality and beauty.