Tuesday 11 March at 6 PM on Zoom, conference by Karl Debreczeny, Senior Curator, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and Elena Pakhoutova, Senior Curator, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.

Starting last fall the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art began a new chapter as a global museum, with the goal of advancing the appreciation and understanding of Himalayan art around the world.  A flagship project of this new direction as a “museum without walls” is Project Himalayan Art: an educational initiative designed to support the inclusion of Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian art and cultures into teaching on Asia across a wide range of disciplines, including history, religion, art, and anthropology.

The initiative seeks to remedy the underrepresentation and lack of introductory resources for teaching about Tibetan, Himalayan and Inner Asian cultures that were instrumental in cross-cultural exchange in Asia while providing new opportunities to engage with visual, material, textual, and ritual histories of East and South Asia.

The project’s main hub is an expandable digital platform that features 108 essays of the publication, the traveling exhibition materials, thematic introductions of key topics for students’ self-guided exploration, an interactive map, a glossary of definitions with audio pronunciations, over 1,000 images, and videos of rituals and art-making technologies. It also features teaching resources with suggested class units to enrich existing curricula, along with a select bibliography. 

The project encourages a critical reframing of the field of Himalayan visual and cultural studies, cultivate a deeper understanding of Himalayan art and cultures situated within a broader context of teaching about Asia and their relevance to contemporary times.