Tuesday, April 9, 7:30pm – Join us for our April Great Presenters event with Joan Blair’s presentation “From the Streets to Galleries – Japanese Woodblock Prints at the MFA.”
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has the largest collection of Japanese woodblock prints outside of Japan – almost 50,000. Though considered “everyday” posters in Japan in the 19th century, they came to be appreciated by Western artists of the time and collected by an eccentric group of Bostonians who subsequently donated them to the Museum. Some 100 years later the collections were finally prepared for display by a dedicated group of volunteers. Joan will speak about the prints, her experience on that team and how it opened the door to a post-retirement career as a Museum of Fine Arts docent.
Joan Blair is a docent at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She studied East Asian history as an undergraduate but took a detour and spent 30 years in the computer industry. A particular interest was introducing computers to libraries. A trip to Japan re-awakened her interest in that culture and the surprising opportunity to use her knowledge of Japan and computers to catalog the Japanese woodblock print collection at the MFA.