June Issue 2000
Soruba Samadhi Gallery in Asheville, NC,
Features Works by Bruce MacDonald
The Soruba Samadhi Gallery in Asheville, NC, will be showing an
exhibit entitled, Spirit Door, of paintings by Bruce MacDonald,
on view through June 30. Former Dean [(CEO) for 16 years)] and
currently President Emeritus of The School of the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston, MacDonald retired in 1994 to fully pursue his
own creative work.
MacDonald writes in his biography, "In 1952, I graduated from high school prepared for a world of work which no longer existed...so I joined the Navy to make a living and see the world. In 1955 while the ship is undergoing repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I read Lust for Life and ordered many of the illustrations of Van Gogh's work. They read Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y. I go to the MOMA. It was an epiphany. I felt like every cell in my body was charged like iron filings suddenly in the presence of a magnet. I wanted to spend my entire life around art. At the time, I thought that might mean being a museum guard because I was an S.P. (Shore Patrol - Navy equivalent of Military Police)."
MacDonald graduated from Harvard University with a Masters and Ph.D. in Fine Arts. He served as junior curator at the Museum of Modem Art [MOMA] in New York City and while there, also Director of a touring exhibition entitled, Photographs before Surrealism, which opened first at the MOMA. In 1973, he became Assistant and then Director of Exhibitions of the Hayden Gallery at M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA). During the course of organizing large and small exhibitions at M.I.T., in 1975 Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, President of the Nalanda Foundation and a member of the Kagyü School and the "supreme abbot" for the Surmang Monasteries in Eastern Tibet asked M.I.T. to mount an exhibition of Tibetan Buddhist art (part of a larger effort to introduce the philosophical and religious traditions of the Buddhism of Tibet into the West) and also to record art historical information which might otherwise be lost. While mounting the exhibition, a comprehensive catalog/book was created: Visual Dharma, the Buddhist Art of Tibet, published by Shambhala Books. The Dalai Lama in a letter which prefaces the book, gives his approval and enthusiasm for the exhibition and resulting book. As a consequence of working closely with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, new doors opened for MacDonald and he became a serious meditator, beginning to move upward from the intellectual realm to the more demanding creative precincts of art.
Spirit Door is
MacDonald's first exhibition in Asheville and the paintings in
this exhibit are extracted from a body of 40 pieces, never before
shown.
For further information check our NC Commercial Gallery listings
or call the gallery at 828/285-0750.
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