Guest Talk: The Leo and Doris Hodroff Collection with Ron Fuchs II

Ron Fuchs II is coming to the Minneapolis Institute of Art on Sunday, October 25, for a talk on the Leo and Doris Hodroff Collection. He'll be in the Pillsbury Auditorium from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM, and the session is a collaboration between the museum and Revere Auctions.

The talk centers on the Hodroffs' Chinese Export and Asian Art Collection, which is widely regarded as a scholarly landmark and perhaps the finest collection of export porcelain ever held in private hands. Fuchs is a leading national authority on Asian export ceramics, and he'll use the collection to walk through the porcelain trade of the 17th and 18th centuries. The core of the presentation is how Chinese master artisans adapted centuries of their own ceramic tradition to meet the opulent social rituals, heraldic demands, and aesthetic tastes of European and American elites—essentially, how they tailored their craft for a global market.

It's the kind of thing that sounds academic until you realize it's really about the intersection of art and commerce on a massive scale: how a workshop in China would take a European family's coat of arms or a specific Western style and figure out how to execute it in porcelain. If you've ever wondered why certain pieces of old ceramics look the way they do, this is where that story comes from.

After the talk, there'll be hors d'oeuvres and tea served, so you can hang around and talk it over. Admission is free, but you'll need a ticket. The talk runs from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM in the Pillsbury Auditorium at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 Third Avenue South.