From the Land of the Immortals: Chinese Taoist Robes and Textiles

The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design presents an exhibition featuring robes and textiles of the Taoist religion.

The Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design is pleased to highlight—for the first time as a group—a number of the Museum’s painstakingly worked 18th- and 19th-century priest robes and textiles made in China for practitioners of the Taoist religion. From the Land of the Immortals: Chinese Taoist Robes and Textiles opens Friday, January 13, 2012.

Populated with Immortals and Taoist symbols of the cosmos, these garments and textiles burst with the energy of fine craftsmanship and the complexities of religious iconography. From the “peaches of immortality” to the recurring symbols of the hare mixing the “elixir of immortality” (moon) and the three-legged crow (sun), motifs in the textile medium are interpreted in the context of Taoist cosmology and ritual practice.

The exhibition is co-curated by Kate Irvin, curator and department head of the RISD Museum’s Costumes + Textiles department, and RISD Associate Professor History of Arts + Visual Culture Paola Demattè. It coincides with the Year of China initiative at Brown University, and was conceived in concert with an exhibition of Taoist paintings at Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum. The exhibition was a collaborative project with Demattè and her fall 2011 class on Chinese art and religion.