Museums - Asian Art Museum of San Francisco

The Asian Art Museum holds one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. Spanning 6,000 years, its scope and breadth enable the museum to provide an introduction to all the major traditions of Asian art and culture. Well known in the scholarly world, the collection contains rare and exceptional objects that are often referenced in journals and textbooks. It began as the vast private collection of Chicago millionaire Avery Brundage, who in 1959 agreed to donate part of it to the city of San Francisco on the condition a new museum be built to house it. In 1966, the new facility opened in a space constructed as a wing of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. Brundage continued to collect for the next decade and in 1969 he forged an agreement with the city to provide for an independent Committee of Asian Art and Culture to run the museum as a seperate entity from the de Young. In 1973 the institution—until then known officially as the Center for Asian Art and Culture—was renamed the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Upon his death in 1975, Brundage bequeathed his remaining Asian art to the museum, bringing his donation to more than 7,700 Asian art objects.
The city’s collection of Asian art was merged with the Brundage Collection and acquisitions have been ongoing. Today the collection includes nearly 15,000 objects ranging from tiny jades to monumental sculptures of stone, bronze, and wood. The collection also includes paintings on screens, hanging scrolls, porcelains and ceramics, lacquers, textiles, furniture, arms and armor, puppets, and basketry. While the collection is relatively small for a major museum, the quality is remarkable. It is the largest museum in the United States devoted exclusively to the arts of Asia.
In addition to the high arts of China, Japan, and Korea, the cultures of Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, and the Philippines are represented through sculpture, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, terra-cotta works, and paintings. Particular highlights are a sizeable collection of stone and bronze material from Angkor Wat, a comprehensive collection of Thai ceramics, and a collection of krises (daggers) from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
In 2003 the museum moved out of the cramped Brundage wing of the de Young and into a new home in the former Main Library building in the Civic Center, which had been retrofitted and expanded by noted architect Gae Aulenti. The new building allows for special exhibitions and a broader presentation of this important collection.