The Rubin Museum of Art presents Project Himalayan Art
Project Himalayan Art
The Rubin Museum of Art is honored to present Project Himalayan Art to teachers, students, and anyone interested in Himalayan art and cultures, as well as those fascinated by the art and cultures of Asia more broadly.
Project Himalayan Art is an ambitious three-part initiative—digital platform, publication, and traveling exhibition—which aims to encourage the widespread incorporation of Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian art and cultures into liberal arts curricula. It seeks to remedy the underrepresentation of Himalayan art, due in large part to the lack of introductory resources for teaching. We’ve worked with specialists to create content for teaching on Asia across a wide range of disciplines, including history, religion, art, anthropology, and more. Our goal is to emphasize cultural connectivity and exchange, demonstrating that these connected traditions extend well beyond the Himalayan mountain range and even the Tibetan Plateau to play a significant role in Asia.
This accessible introduction traces the art and material culture of the Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian regions. The object-centered approach features essays from seventy-two international scholars who explore 108—an auspicious number—objects from international holdings and the Rubin Museum’s collection, along with sites, architectural monuments, and works in situ that illuminate cross-cultural exchange centered on Tibetan art and culture. These essays illuminate the connections and movement of things, people, traditions, ideas, and styles to and from Tibetan regions through paintings, sculptures, drawings, pilgrimage maps, sites, structures, ritual objects, textiles, and more, dating from Neolithic to contemporary times, and highlight a complex web of connections across time and space.
This digital platform offers source material on Himalayan art through digital components for the traveling exhibition, in-depth object explorations, online collection materials, and digital features such as an interactive map, hundreds of related objects, a glossary, and videos of rituals and art-making technologies.
Note: The Rubin Museum of Art’s physical galleries will permanently close on October 6, 2024.
