New Portland museum curator for Asian art excited to show broader world of work

Jeannie Kenmotsu welcomes the excitements and challenges of being Portland Art Museum’s new Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator for Asian Art.

“There’s real diversity here of a meaningful kind, not as a buzzword,” she said. “For me ... it means I feel a responsibility and an excitement about bringing some of that forward so that it’s kind of in more public view.”

Kenmotsu was appointed to the position in December; she had been serving as the interim head of Asian art after her predecessor, Maribeth Graybill, retired in 2019.

In 2017 Kenmotsu joined PAM’s staff as Japan Foundation assistant curator of Japanese art and was promoted to associate curator in 2019.

“My predecessor got a really big fantastic grant that is focused on infrastructure at museums, and it’s funded by The Japan Foundation. And it was a five-year grant for a position at the assistant curator level,” she said.

Kenmotsu has extensive knowledge of Japanese art history from what she terms the early modern period.

“So 17th to 19th-century painting, illustrated books, prints in particular,” she said. “This is a moment in Japan when there’s just such an incredible flowering of popular culture. There’s art forms of patronage at kind of every level. And so there’s just so much rich art to study.”