PROFILE
Sarah E. Thompson
Received the A.B. from Harvard University and the PhD. from Columbia University. She taught Japanese and Asian art history at Vassar College, Oberlin College, and the University of Oregon and curated several exhibitions of Japanese prints (most notably “Undercurrents in the Floating World: Censorship and Japanese Prints” at the Asia Society in New York in 1991) before coming to the MFA in 2004. She is now supervising the Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP), whose ultimate goal is to photograph and catalogue all 50,000 Japanese prints in the MFA collection.
■ EXHIBITIONS CURATED INCLUDE
“Visions of Kyoto: Scenes from Japan's Ancient Capital.” With Quintana Heathman. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, September 20, 2008 - May 31, 2009.
“Printed Treasures: Highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.” With Nagata Seiji. Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, January 2 - April 6, 2008; Niigata City Art Museum, April 15 - May 13, 2008; Fukuoka Art Museum, July 12 - August 31, 2008; Edo-Tokyo Museum, October 7 - November 30, 2008.
“Sumo: Japan's Big Sport.” With Abraham Schroeder. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, November 10, 2007 - August 3, 2008.
“Women of Renown: Female Heroes and Villains in the Prints of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1797-1861.” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January 10 - October 28, 2007.
“On Stage in Osaka: Actor Prints from the MFA Collection.”
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 5 - December 31, 2006.
■ PUBLICATIONS INCLUDE
Author
Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō. San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 2009.
“Art of the Town.” In Anne Nishimura Morse, ed., MFA Highlights: Arts of Japan. Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2009.
“Ukiyo-e in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Prints, Books, and Paintings, 1890-2008,” in Boston bijutsukan ukiyo-e meihin ten/Printed Treasures: Highlights from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Tokyo: Nikkei Inc., 2008), pp. 240-245. Also twenty-eight catalogue entries, co-authored with Quintana Heathman.
“The Original Source (Accept No Substitutes!): Okumura Masanobu.” In Designed for Pleasure: The World of Edo Japan in Prints and Paintings, 1680-1860 (Seattle and London: Asia Society and Japanese Art Society of America in association with University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 57-79.
“The Twelve Animals in Unified Silla, Tang China, and Nara Japan.” Oriental Art, vol. 49, no. 5 (2004), pp. 22-31.
“Parody and Poetry: Japan versus China in Two Eighteenth-Century Ukiyo-e Prints.” Impressions: The Journal of the Ukiyo-e Society of America 24 (2002), pp. 72-91.
■ Joint message by Sarah E. Thompson and Abraham Schroeder
We are very happy to participate in this groundbreaking conference. We look forward to comparing our experiences with those of colleagues from around the world, as all of us explore the application of new technologies to problems that (as in our case) may have been difficult or impossible to solve until very recently.
Abstract
The Japanese Print Access and Documentation Project (JPADP) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)
The collection of some 50,000 Japanese prints at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the largest such collection outside Japan and one of the largest in the world; it includes everything from early Buddhist printing to works by living artists but consists primarily of Edo-period ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The enormous size of the collection, much of which was acquired in Japan during the Meiji period, made it difficult to locate individual works within the collection and impossible to publish a conventional hard-copy catalogue. Storage conditions were also often unacceptable by modern archival standards.
To address these problems, in January 2005 the MFA launched a project to photograph, catalogue digitally for website publication, and rehouse the entire collection. The photography, rehousing, and web publication with basic initial cataloguing are expected to be completed during 2010.
The first half of our double presentation will introduce the special problems of the MFA collection and the plans made for dealing with them; the second half will focus on the technical details of the project and the day-to-day workflow for both MFA employees and the MFA volunteers and visiting scholars (from institutions such as Ritsumeikan University) whose help makes the project possible.
