San Antonio Museum of Art Hires Mai Yamaguchi as Coates-Cowden-Brown Associate Curator of Asian Art
January 13 – January 13, 2025
January 13 – January 13, 2025
San Antonio, TX—January 13, 2025—The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) announced today Mai Yamaguchi as the Museum’s new Coates-Cowden-Brown Associate Curator of Asian Art following an international search. Yamaguchi brings a wealth of expertise in Asian art, with a distinguished academic and curatorial career. She will start her new role on March 3, 2025.
"We are thrilled to welcome Mai Yamaguchi to the San Antonio Museum of Art as our new Coates-Cowden-Brown Associate Curator of Asian Art," said Emily Ballew Neff, the Kelso Director at SAMA. "With SAMA’s exceptional collection of Asian art as a foundation, we are excited to see how Mai’s extensive experience and innovative curatorial vision will inspire fresh interpretations and enrich our institution’s offerings.”
The San Antonio Museum of Art’s Asian collection is one of the largest concentrations of Asian art in the Southwest and consists of approximately 3,000 objects drawn from several cultures across the continent, including China, Japan, Korea, India, Tibet, Nepal, Pakistan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. The Asian art collection is especially renowned for SAMA’s deep holdings of Chinese ceramics, which represent more than 5,000 years of ceramic production in China.
“I am honored to join the San Antonio Museum of Art,” said Yamaguchi. “SAMA’s Asian collection has great breadth and treasures, and I Iook forward to telling engaging and nuanced stories about the connections between cultures within Asia and beyond.”
Yamaguchi worked as Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Japanese and Korean Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) from 2021–2025. During her tenure there, she organized several special exhibitions, including The Art of Literacy in Early Modern Japan (2023), which explored the interplay of visual and textual literacy through rare printed and hand-painted books, prints, and scrolls. Most recently, she curated Catch of the Day: Humans and Marine Animals in Japan (2024), which focused on how the Japanese expressed their relationship to the sea through art.
"I am delighted to welcome Mai Yamaguchi to SAMA’s exceptional curatorial team. Her deep expertise and thoughtful curatorial vision will enhance the way we present Asian art at SAMA," said Jessica Powers, Chief Curator at SAMA. "Her ability to connect historical and contemporary narratives through art will open up new opportunities for engaging our audiences and fostering meaningful cultural dialogue.”
In addition to her curatorial work at Mia, Yamaguchi has delivered lectures and presentations at venues including the San Diego Museum of Art and the National Consortium for Teaching About Asia.
Mai received her MA and PhD in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University and obtained her BA from the University of Chicago in Art History and Romance Language and Literatures. Her dissertation, Paintings, Bound: Printed Books of Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Japan, examined how readers engaged with and developed visual literacy through printed books of pictures in nineteenth-century Japan and how they were later adapted abroad. Her research has been supported by Fulbright Japan, the Harvard-Yenching Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Photo credit: By Dan Dennehy, Head of Visual Resources and Photographer at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
