Boat Race Dinner, Saturday May 22, 2010

Those of us who remember the amazing exhibition of the Emperor Qin’s terracotta army will be excited to know that Jane Portal, our speaker, was the key person in bringing those figures to London in 2008.Museum curator, specialist in Oriental art, and author, Ms. Portal is the Matsutaro Shoriki Chair, Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Educated at Girton College, Cambridge, and the recipient of advanced degrees from London, Beijing and Seoul Universities, she has written widely on Chinese and Korean art and archaeology.

Prior to coming to the MFA, Ms. Portal was head of the Chinese and Korean section of the Asian Department of the British Museum. Her stunning exhibition of the life-size terracotta army from Xian was a high point of her twenty-year career there. Members can look forward to a rare opportunity to hear about the curatorial responsibilities and decisions that underpin such a great exhibition.

The title of her talk was “First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army - Putting on a blockbuster at the British Museum”.