Illinois collector gives UT Dallas's Crow Museum more than 4,000 Asian artworks and $10 million for their care

An Illinois collector has given more than 4,000 Asian artworks to the Trammell and Margaret Crow Museum of Asian Art at UT Dallas, along with $10 million to look after them.

Barry L. MacLean donated the works from the MacLean Collection and pledged the money for their preservation, maintenance and care, the university announced Wednesday. The Crow family donated the museum's entire collection to the university in 2019.

The pieces cover close to 5,000 years, reaching back to Neolithic times. The university says about half come from China, with many others from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Indonesia. The gift includes pottery, bronzes, stone sculpture and architectural fragments.

Where to see it

Some of the collection is already in public view. Several outdoor sculptures stand outside the first phase of the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Jr. Athenaeum on the Richardson campus. At the museum's downtown galleries in the Dallas Arts District, the exhibition "Fire and Earth: Early Chinese Pottery from the MacLean Collection" shows 45 ceramic vessels.

More of the works will be moved to the campus gradually, the university says, without giving a schedule.

How the gift came about

According to the university, MacLean and his late wife, Mary Ann, began collecting old ceramics about 1970 and were focused mostly on Asian art by the mid-1980s. A museum on the family's Illinois property was finished in 2004 to hold much of the collection.

The link to the Crow began about 10 years ago, when Tibetan book covers from the MacLean Collection traveled to the museum's downtown galleries. Richard Pegg, the MacLean Collection's director and curator of Asian art, said the two collections fit together because the Crow leans toward later pieces and much of the MacLean material is older.

He called the MacLean holdings "one of the great Asian art collections put together in the United States."

Pegg said the family wanted the works at a research university, where faculty and students could study original objects. Amy Hofland, the Crow Museum's senior director, said the museum plans to use the works in college and K-12 teaching as well as in its galleries.

The university's release did not put a dollar value on the artworks themselves.

Sources

news.utdallas.edu