Asian Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection

September 26th – January 31st 2013

Asian Art: Selections from the Permanent Collection

Standing Female Dancer,
Chinese Tang Dynasy (618-907A.D.)
Earthenware with painted polychrome decoration.

The museum's Asian Collection has been re-installed in refurbished galleries in the 1877 old jail building of the Old Jail Art Center. Patrick Kelly, OJAC Preparator, designed the reinstallation and built new exhibit cases to house the pieces. Jennifer Casler Price, Curator of Asian and Non-Western Art at the Kimbell Art Museum, researched the collection and wrote the labels and didactic material for the reinstallation. OJAC Education Director Kathryn Mitchell developed a teacher's resource guide to the Asian Collection. All this work was funded in part by a grant from the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency.


From its earliest days, the Old Jail Art Center has had Asian art in its collection. The mothers of the museum's co-founders, Reilly Nail and Bill Bomar, collected Asian art. At the time of the museum's founding, the late Jewel Nail Bomar's collection of ancient Chinese tomb figures was in her son's hands, and he contributed it to the initial collection of the museum. Nail persuaded his mother, Wyldon Burgess Nail Harrold, to give pieces from her collection of more recent artifacts. Through the years, others have enriched the collection with their gifts, including co-founders Bomar and Nail.

Though small and eclectic, the collection comprises Chinese ceramics from the Han through Qing dynasties as well as an assortment of Japanese prints and ceramics and a few works from other cultures. Pieces from the collection will be rotated through the old jail galleries. To augment the exhibition, the museum borrows Asian art from other collections-in the inaugural installation from the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas, and the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, New York City.