Yoga: The Art of Transformation
October 19, 2013–January 26, 2014 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

Future Exhibitions

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.

Learn the latest about the exhibition, related programs, and events by signing up for our e-newsletter. Want to help spread the word? Become a Freer|Sackler Yoga Messenger and join our crowdfunding campaign, Together We're One, launching May 29; email us for more information. Or support the exhibition now with a donation to Yoga: the Art of Transformation. Thank you for bringing this incredible exhibition to light!

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