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February Issue 2007
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC, Features Exhibits of African Masks and Divine Figures
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC, is presenting two exhibitions on view at the Ackland Museum including: Making Connections: African Masks, Rituals, and Art Museums Window to the Humanities, on view through Mar. 11, 2007 and Fashioning the Divine: South Asian Sculpture at the Ackland Art Museum, curated by Carolyn Wood and Pika Ghosh, on view through Mar. 25, 2007.
Making Connections exhibits a student researched and organized selection of the Ackland's African masks. The installation, including video, photographs, and interpretive labels, invites visitors to view masks as elements in larger ensembles of costuming, song, and performance, and to consider how they connect human communities with surrounding spiritual and natural worlds.
This exhibition was curated by Carol Magee and her students.
From graceful dancers to sword-wielding celestial women, from the creative power of Shiva to the compassion of the Buddha, the objects in Fashioning the Divine illuminate the desire of whole communities to overcome any and all distance between human beings and divine figures in South Asia between the second and thirteenth centuries. Like the beliefs these pieces embody, the exhibition is richly varied and complex. Each object serves as a small piece in an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, suggesting centuries of architecture, narrative, as well as individual and communal devotion across the Indian subcontinent.
More than seven years in the planning, Fashioning the Divine celebrates twenty-four South Asian sculptures and fragments from the Ackland Collection, many of which, have never before been on display in the Ackland!
Continuing in a long tradition of collaborative research at the Ackland, Fashioning the Divine coincides with the publication of a scholarly catalogue of the same name. Pika Ghosh, Department of Art , The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill served as lead scholar and editor. Three internationally recognized scholars provide introductions to three sections of the catalogue including: Janice Leoshko, University of Texas, Austin; Darielle Mason, Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Padma Kaimal, Colgate University. The original research for each object was conducted by graduate students in the Art History program at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This exhibition is made possible by an award from Palm Beach, America's International Fine Art & Antique Fair's Museum Publication Grant Program, the J. Charles Morrow III Ackland Endowment Fund, and the William Hayes Ackland Trust.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the Museum at 919/966-5736 or visit (www.ackland.org).
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