Future Exhibitions

Nine Deaths, Two Births: Xu Bing's Phoenix Project

April 27–September 2, 2013
Sackler

Chinese artist Xu Bing spent more than two years creating his newest work, Phoenix Project, a massive installation on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). At once strange and fiercely beautiful, the installation comprises two birds fabricated entirely from materials found at construction sites in Beijing. This complementary exhibition at the Sackler traces the evolution of Phoenix Project. Reimagining an ancient Chinese motif, Xu offers a view of the “new China” and the labor conditions that support its massive commercial and spatial development. While the sculpture itself remains at MASS MoCA, the Sackler exhibition features materials used to plan the work, including drawings, scale models, and reconfigured construction fragments. Also on view are related objects selected by the artist from the Freer and Sackler collections.

Sylvan Sounds: Freer, Dewing, and Japan

Freer, gallery 9
May 28, 2013–May 28, 2014

Museum founder Charles Lang Freer’s taste for Japanese art grew out of his affection for American tonalist paintings. This intimate exhibition illuminates this connection by juxtaposing landscapes by American artist Thomas Dewing (1851–1938) with Japanese works that Freer acquired in the late 1890s, just after his first tour of Asia. Freer’s idealized notions of “old Japan” paralleled the nostalgic, pastoral aestheticism of Dewing’s atmospheric landscapes. Dewing often acted as Freer’s buying agent at the New York branch of Yamanaka and Company, helping his patron select Japanese prints, hanging scrolls, and screens that both reflected and affected his own artistic production. On view are such Edo-period works as Moon over a Moor alongside Dewing’s paintings, including the exhibition’s namesake, The Four Sylvan Sounds.

Yoga: The Art of Transformation

October 19, 2013–January 26, 2014
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Through masterpieces of Indian sculpture and painting, Yoga: The Art of Transformation explores yoga’s goals; its Hindu as well as Buddhist, Jain, and Sufi manifestations; its means of transforming body and consciousness; and its profound philosophical foundations. The first exhibition to present this leitmotif of Indian visual culture, it also examines the roles that yogis and yoginis played in Indian society over two thousand years.

Yoga includes more than 120 works dating from the third to the early twentieth century. Temple sculptures, devotional icons, illustrated manuscripts, and court paintings—as well as colonial and early modern photographs, books, and films—illuminate yoga’s central tenets and its obscured histories.

The exhibition borrows from twenty-five museums and private collections in India, Europe, and the United States. Highlights include an installation that reunites for the first time three monumental stone yogini goddesses from a tenth-century Chola temple; ten folios from the first illustrated compilation of asanas (yogic postures), made for a Mughal emperor in 1602, which have never before been exhibited together; and Thomas Edison’s Hindoo Fakir (1906), the first movie ever produced about India.