The Walters Art Museum’s reconceived installation of its Asian and Islamic art galleries emphasizes cultural interactions and interconnectivity.
A Buddha from China, circa A.D. 590, is made of wood with lacquer, gilding and paint. “Across Asia: Arts of Asia and the Islamic World” highlights strengths of the Walters Art Museum’s collection, including representations of the Buddha.
The galleries are organized around three broad geographic areas — Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Islamic world — with both the layout and exhibits underscoring “how these influences, religions, traditions were flowing from one place to another,” as Proser puts it. They are further divided to focus on subregions, including Japan and Korea; materials, like ceramics; and categories, such as weaponry.
Of what’s newly on view, the standout is a thammat, or pulpit, from a 19th-century Thai Buddhist temple — one of the only known examples of its kind in a U.S. museum. The 12-foot-high wooden structure, made with hundreds of gilded glass pieces that glitter like metal, is in the form of a miniature temple. Its ornate design suggests it was donated to a temple by a member of the royal family.
“So often, displays of Islamic art kind of perpetuate this idea of Islam as this monolith,” says Ashley Dimmig, a guest curator and former postdoctoral fellow who worked on the reinstallation, “when in reality, Islamic art is a global art, and is incredibly diverse over one and a half millennia.”
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