Daniel Sneider, Associate Director of Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center, talks about his family’s long engagement with Korea.
Lea Sneider has a passion for folk art: the ceramics, woodwork, paintings, and sculpture used and enjoyed in everyday life. While accompanying her husband, Richard L. Sneider, to his appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Korea in 1974, Mrs. Sneider became an avid explorer of the art galleries and museums of Seoul, Daegu, and Busan. She sought out scholars of the rich tradition of Korean folk art, a field largely unexplored in the West at the time.
After returning to the United States, Mrs. Sneider became an art dealer, curator, and influential mentor, as three of her former assistants went on to become East Asian art teachers in leading US universities: Princeton, Chicago and Brigham Young. Sneider, together with Robert Moes, former Curator of Asian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, produced the first-ever exhibition of Korean folk art in the West, Auspicious Spirits: Korean Folk Paintings and Related Objects, which opened in New York in 1983 and traveled across the country. "The work in Auspicious Spirits has the magic that has come to be expected from Asian art of the first quality," wrote the New York Times.
This exhibition pays tribute to Lea Sneider, a great patron of Korean art and longtime board member of The Korea Society, with pieces from her personal collection.
Monday, November 17, 2014 | 6 PM
