2 days ago
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- New York Times
The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room Reopens at the Brooklyn Museum
The concept of rebirth is central to Buddhism, which teaches that every individual has more than one life. That also appears to be true of the Rubin Museum of Art, long one of New York City's prime locations for viewing Buddhist works. Although the institution closed its doors permanently in October 2024, one of its most cherished installations is taking on a new existence: The Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room will reopen on Wednesday for a six-year stay at the Brooklyn Museum.
The Shrine Room, which Holland Cotter, the chief art critic of The New York Times, once described as 'magnificent,' is now on the Brooklyn Museum's second floor, in its Arts of Asia Galleries, where it is like a darker jewel wedged among a series of modernist white boxes. Carefully reassembled to incorporate the same wooden posts and overhead beams as at the Rubin, the 400-square-foot enclosed space also includes the original's transparent glass doors, which both welcome in onlookers and gently seal them off from exterior noise.
'We didn't want the Shrine Room to be a thoroughfare,' Joan Cummins, the Brooklyn Museum's senior curator of Asian art, said in an interview at the site.
Inside, the space looks as if it had been dropped in intact from a prosperous Tibetan home, featuring colorful thangkas, or scroll paintings, as well as elaborate decorations to welcome gods. Silver offering bowls and statues of deities in various metals sit atop painted furnishings, along with musical instruments — an elegant bell, a conch shell repurposed as a trumpet, Mongolian cymbals attached to flowing silk. One of many statues of deities in the Shrine Room is this 19th-century bejeweled copper and gold image of Ushnishavijaya, a goddess associated with long life. Credit... Guarionex Rodriguez for The New York Times Music infuses Tibetan Buddhist ritual, represented here by a pair of Mongolian cymbals from the 18th-19th centuries, attached to lengths of silk. Credit... Guarionex Rodriguez for The New York Times
The faint scent of incense fills the air, along with the recorded chants of Buddhist monks and nuns. The Shrine Room invites visitors not just to gaze on more than 100 artifacts from nine centuries but also to sit on small stools and experience the space as a Tibetan family might: as a place for meditation or prayer, as a refuge from a fractious world.
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