The Tibetan Shrine Room

The Rubin Museum of Art (New York City) presents an exhibition that showcases works of art created between the 13th and 19th centuries from the Tibetan Plateau, China, and Mongolia.

The Tibetan Shrine Room from the Alice S. Kandell Collection

A spectacular shrine room on loan from the Alice S. Kandell Collection and organized by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution provides Gateway to Himalayan Art visitors an extraordinary opportunity to experience Tibetan Buddhist art in context. Containing approximately 170 works of art created between the 13th and 19th centuries from the Tibetan Plateau, China, and Mongolia, the shrine room highlights the religious context in which these sacred objects would be found in a private Tibetan shrine.

All of the objects - thangkas as well as sculptures of buddhas, bodhisattvas, tantric deities, female deities, wrathful deities and teachers - are arranged on traditional Tibetan furniture and according to the hierarchy they assume in Tibetan Buddhist practices. Ritual objects, such as butter lamps, offering bowls, vajras and bells, rosaries, conch trumpets, horns and reeds, and hand drums, are also on view.

An accompanying publication, A Shrine for Tibet: The Alice S. Kandell Collection, is available at the Shop @ RMA. Recently published by Tibet House US, the catalog features extensive full-color photography, a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and essays by Robert A.F. Thurman, the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and co-founder of Tibet House, and Marylin M. Rhie, the Jessie Wells Post Professor of Art and professor of East Asian Studies at Smith College. 299 pages; $60. 

Curated by Elena Pakhoutova and Martin Brauen

To learn even more about The Tibetan Shrine Room, read the press release.