The Educated Art Buyer: Smart Collecting Practices in the Twenty-first Century

Over the past decade regulations related to art acquisition and transport across borders have become increasingly complex. Join Adriana Proser, John H. Foster Senior Curator for Traditional Asian Art; Clare McGowan, Senior Registrar and Collections Manager at Asia Society; and Sharon Flescher, Executive Director of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), as they discuss steps that can be taken to become an educated art consumer in today’s world. The program will include a presentation by Dr. Flescher on new IFAR resources that help collectors research provenance and navigate the increasingly complex and abundant body of legislation and case law regarding the acquisition and ownership of artworks.

Since 1998, Sharon Flescher has been the Executive Director of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a nonprofit educational and research organization that works at the intersection of art scholarship, art law and the public interest, and also Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning IFAR Journal. A graduate of Barnard College, Dr. Flescher holds Masters Degrees in both English literature and art history and has a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. She also attended the Wharton School of Business. In addition to her work at IFAR, she is an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University (NYU). Dr. Flescher has lectured and published widely; most recently, she contributed the chapter on Provenance Research in the Legal Guide to Museum Professionals, and many articles in the IFAR Journal. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and programs around the world and has served on advisory roundtables for government agencies, such the U.S. State Department and the National Archives and Records Administration, and represented IFAR in Lyon, France at the 2003 Emergency Interpol Conference on Iraq. She conceived and launched IFAR’s two major online resources, the Catalogues Raisonnés Database and the Art Law & Cultural Property Database, for which she has remained Project Director, and she co-authored IFAR’s online Provenance Guide.

Clare McGowan has over 20 years of experience in Museum Registration, including 17 years at the Asia Society, New York. She is the collections manager for the Asia Society’s permanent collection, which includes the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection. She has facilitated loans for over 50 exhibitions organized by the Asia Society Museum and has coordinated loans from collections in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America. McGowan has previously worked at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, the National Academy of Design, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Nassau County Museum of Art.

Adriana Proser is John H. Foster Senior Curator of Traditional Asian Art at Asia Society Museum, New York. A specialist in Chinese art, over the last fifteen years she has organized and co-organized over forty exhibitions for Asia Society and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, featuring diverse works from all over Asia. These include the current exhibition Secrets of the Sea: A Tang Shipwreck and Early Trade in Asia. Her writing appears in numerous catalogues and specialist publications. Proser was formerly Assistant Curator of East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is recipient of a 1995 Ph.D. in Chinese art and archaeology from Columbia University.