| Details | How do you represent the many aspects of the Goddess? Vidya Dehejia, the curator of Devi: The Great Goddess (Sackler Gallery, 1999), discusses the goals, politics, and aesthetics behind this groundbreaking exhibition of South Asian art. Many of the strategies she employed at the time—from creating dialogue between the contemporary and the ancient to bringing together folk, popular, and high art traditions—remain cutting edge today.
The talk is structured as an interview with the museum’s curator of South and Southeast Asian art, Debra Diamond. Register here: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_u7Gzz7VGTXiyrrC4UPeSKQ
Dr. Vidya Dehejia, the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University, is a recipient of India’s Padma Bhushan award. She is fluent in ancient and modern Indian languages, and her work has ranged from Buddhist art of the centuries BC to the esoteric temples of North India, and from the sacred bronzes of South India to art under the British Raj. Among the many celebrated exhibitions she curated at the Freer and Sackler are The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India (2002) and India Through the Lens: Photography 1840–1911 (2000).
Dr. Debra Diamond is curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Image:
The goddess Bhadrakali worshipped by the sage Chyavana from a Tantric Devi series
India, Pahari Hills
ca. 1660–70
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Freer Gallery of Art F1997.8 |
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