Join us for a free one-day workshop for educators at the Japanese American National Museum, hosted by the USC U.S.-China Institute and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. This workshop will include a guided tour of the beloved exhibition Common Ground: The Heart of Community, slated to close permanently in January 2025. Following the tour, learn strategies for engaging students in the primary source artifacts, images, and documents found in JANM’s vast collection and discover classroom-ready resources to support teaching and learning about the Japanese American experience.
Deities, Demons, and Teachers of Tibet, Nepal, and India
The UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive presents a rotating display of works by anonymous Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artisans.
Where
Joyful and sensual sculptural figures of Indian deities and dancers join radiant images of enlightened beings from Tibet and Nepal in Deities, Demons, and Teachers, which presents a rotating display of works by anonymous Indian, Nepalese, and Tibetan artisans. A tenth-century sandstone figure of Ganesha, the elephant-headed deity worshipped by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists, graces the entrance to the exhibition, a site appropriate to Ganesha’s role in removing obstacles and blessing any new endeavor. Whether viewed as a cosmic dancer or a cavorting adolescent, this image of Ganesha is confirmation of the wonder and delight to be found in the sculpture and painting of these ancient cultures.
Hindus and Buddhists both revere and celebrate female deities and often depict goddesses in idealized form with exaggerated marks of beauty. In Dancing Devi, a twelfth-century buff-sandstone sculpture from central India, the beauty of the bejeweled and crowned figure is accentuated by the larger-than-life proportions of breasts and buttocks. A more reserved but no less beautifully idealized feminine form is seen in Tara, a seventeenth-century Nepalese bronze, where the figure is surrounded by a fanciful garden of birds, musicians, and garlands.
Very early images of the Buddha are rare, so it is quite exceptional that in addition to the massive bronze fourteenth-century Tibetan Buddha in the center of the gallery, this exhibition also features a stone image of a third-century seated Buddha from the Swat Valley and a tenth- or eleventh-century bronze Standing Buddha from Western Tibet. An array of bodhisattvas and attendant deities from these regions, including a painting of the Thirteenth Karmapa (at left), believed to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, fill out the gathered celestial realm of the Buddhist cosmology.
Deities, Demons, and Teachers is organized by Senior Curator for Asian Art Julia M. White.
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Please join us for the Grad Mixer! Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, Enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow students across USC Annenberg. Graduate students from any field are welcome to join, so it is a great opportunity to meet fellow students with IR/foreign policy-related research topics and interests.
RSVP link: https://forms.gle/1zer188RE9dCS6Ho6
Events
Hosted by USC Annenberg Office of International Affairs, enjoy food, drink and conversation with fellow international students.
Join us for an in-person conversation on Thursday, November 7th at 4pm with author David M. Lampton as he discusses his new book, Living U.S.-China Relations: From Cold War to Cold War. The book examines the history of U.S.-China relations across eight U.S. presidential administrations.