This intimate exhibition drew from more than 3,500 Japanese objects in the Boone Collection of the Field Museum in Chicago—traditionally a place for “material culture”—and brought scroll paintings, woodblock prints, and decorative arts objects from the later Edo to Taisho periods (18th–20th centuries) to an art museum context.
Scrutinizing these terms for their aesthetic, cultural, and historical issues, this exhibition examined what this nomenclature tells us about the Boone Collection and museum and collection studies in general.