Dr. Felice Fischer

Dr. Fischer received her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University, specializing in classical Japanese literature. She has been a member of the curatorial staff of the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1972. During her tenure with the Museum, Dr. Fischer has installed a range of exhibitions, including Southeast Asian Ceramics in 1977, and Quest for Eternity: Chinese Ceramic Sculpture from the People's Republic of China in 1987.

In 1994 Dr. Fischer co-organized with Dr. Kathryn Hiesinger the major museum project, Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950, and co-authored the accompanying award-winning catalogue, which was translated into German, Italian, French, and Japanese. Japanese Design traveled to three European venues as well as Japan.

Throughout her tenure at the Museum, Dr. Fischer has traveled widely in Japan, China and Korea. She has been a member of the International Advisory Panel at the Kyoto National Museum, and curatorial liaison at the Tokyo National Museum for the National Gallery of Art. She is a founding member of the board of directors of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Korean Heritage Group, and of the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, and she is a member of the board of directors of the U.S.-Chinese People Friendship Association.

Dr. Fischer has organized annual rotating exhibitions drawn from the Museum's permanent collections that have served to illustrate and explore diverse facets of East Asian Art. These have included Ink Traces: East Asian Calligraphy (1999), The Spirit of Korea (1998), Chinese Landscape Painting (1994), Japanese Buddhist Art (1990), The Arts of Tea (1988), and Islamic Art (1977).

Dr. Fischer is the author of several issues of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, including Meiji Painting from the Fenollosa Collection (1992), and Japanese Buddhist Art (1991), as well as the editor of the Japanese-language edition of the Museum's Handbook of the Collections (1999), Japanese Painting and Sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Tokyo: Association of Scientific Research on Historic and Artistic Works of Japan, 1993), and Phila-Nipponica: An Historic Guide to Philadelphia and Japan (Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia, 1999). She has also written about other aspects of the Museum's collection of East Asian art, including a survey of Classical Carpets in Philadelphia for Hali magazine (1996).

Dr. Fischer has lectured at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as in Japan on a range of topics relating to Asian art and museum collections in America and Japan.

Acquisitions enhancing the Museum's collection during Dr. Fischer's curatorship have encompassed a full range of art from East Asia. Notable among them has been a remarkable group of contemporary Japanese ceramics, some of which are on view in Currents in Clay (through October 2001). Other highlights are a pair of Chinese Imperial Bowls dating to the reign of the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722), a rare 15th-century cast-iron sculpture of a Tiger from Korea, examples of calligraphy by Japanese literati painters Ike no Taiga and Nukina Kaioku, and a lacquer Writing Box and a scroll devoted to Love Poems from the Shinkokin wakashu Imperial Anthology with calligraphy by Hon'ami Koetsu.