Chinese Painting

Stephen Little

Dr. Stephen Little Ph.D. is an American Asian art scholar, museum administrator and artist. Stephen Little's father was a linguist and cultural attaché for the government of the United States. Little was raised in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma, and Turkey, not living in the United States until age 11. He initially studied nuclear physics, but changed his major to Chinese art.

He received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1975, an M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977, and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1987. He held curatorial positions at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (1977–1982), the Cleveland Museum of Art (1987–1989), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (1989–1994). He held the Pritzker Curatorship of Asian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (1995–2002), prior to becoming Director of the Honolulu Museum of Art in 2003. In 2011, Little left Hawaii to become department head and curator of Chinese and Korean art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Julian Sands

Julian Sands first visited LACMA in the late 1980s, and has been a friend to the museum ever since. Best known as an actor (film, television, and theatre), he is also a keen student of the decorative arts and art history. Sands has a particular interest in the arts of Asia, and has a specialist knowledge of Indian silver - he has donated several significant example to LACMA's permanent collection. He is also an enthusiastic mountaineer.