Jay Xu ( Chinese: 许杰; born 1963) ^[1] is a Chinese-born American art museum director, art historian, and curator. ^[2] He is the first Chinese-American curator of a major museum in the United States. ^[3] Xu is the director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, since 2008. ^[4]

Early life

Jay Xu was born in 1963 in Shanghai, China. ^{[5] [6]} He attended Shanghai University. Xu work as an assistant to the museum director Ma Chengyuan at the Shanghai Museum. ^[3] Later, due to work reasons, he came into contact with Robert Bagley, a professor at Princeton University who came to Shanghai for academic exchanges.

Career

He moved to the United States in 1990, to attended a M.A. degree and PhD program at Princeton University. ^[7] After graduation he worked as a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from 1995 until 1996. ^[3] Xu worked as the curator of Chinese art at the Seattle Art Museum from 1996 to 2003; and as the head of the Asian art department and chairman of the Department of Asian and Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 2003 to 2006. ^{[3] [7]}

Since June 2008, Xu has served as the director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, succeeding Emily Sano. ^[3] Under his leadership, the Asian Art Museum avoided a financial crisis, ^[4] it has grown its collection with more than 2,200 new art acquisitions over the past 15 years, and it has hosted 100 or more museum exhibitions. ^[3] In 2017, Xu led a fundraising campaign to fund the museum's building renovation and expansion. ^{[8] [3] [9]} In 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests, the museum under Xu's leadership removed the bust of Avery Brundage, someone accused of being a Nazi sympathizer and a racist. ^{[10] [11]} During this time the museum also decided to critically examine the provenance of the artwork in the collection. ^[10]

References