The idea of rebirth is central to Buddhism, which teaches that each particular person has multiple life. That additionally seems to be true of the Rubin Museum of Artwork, lengthy one in every of New York Metropolis’s prime areas for viewing Buddhist works. Though the establishment closed its doors permanently in October 2024, one in every of its most cherished installations is taking over a brand new existence: The Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room will reopen on Wednesday for a six-year keep on the Brooklyn Museum.
The Shrine Room, which Holland Cotter, the chief artwork critic of The New York Occasions, once described as “magnificent,” is now on the Brooklyn Museum’s second flooring, in its Arts of Asia Galleries, the place it is sort of a darker jewel wedged amongst a collection of modernist white packing containers. Rigorously reassembled to include the identical picket posts and overhead beams as on the Rubin, the 400-square-foot enclosed house additionally consists of the unique’s clear glass doorways, which each welcome in onlookers and gently seal them off from exterior noise.
“We didn’t need the Shrine Room to be a thoroughfare,” Joan Cummins, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of Asian artwork, mentioned in an interview on the website.
Inside, the house appears as if it had been dropped in intact from a affluent Tibetan dwelling, that includes colourful thangkas, or scroll work, in addition to elaborate decorations to welcome gods. Silver providing bowls and statues of deities in numerous metals sit atop painted furnishings, together with musical devices — a sublime bell, a conch shell repurposed as a trumpet, Mongolian cymbals connected to flowing silk.
The faint scent of incense fills the air, together with the recorded chants of Buddhist monks and nuns. The Shrine Room invitations guests not simply to gaze on greater than 100 artifacts from 9 centuries but additionally to sit down on small stools and expertise the house as a Tibetan household may: as a spot for meditation or prayer, as a refuge from a fractious world.
“Standing in entrance of objects in one thing that was harking back to their unique context is a really, very highly effective expertise,” Jorrit Britschgi, the Rubin’s government director, mentioned in a phone interview.
In search of to make sure the Rubin’s long-term stability, its leaders mentioned in a statement last year that they have been redefining the 21-year-old establishment as a “world museum” with out partitions. Now referred to as the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, it has retained its assortment and continues to lend its treasures and set up touring reveals.
The Shrine Room is its first major installation in New York since its Manhattan constructing closed. The museum’s leaders thought-about it particularly essential to search out this exhibition a brief native dwelling: Because it opened on the Rubin in 2013, the Shrine Room has welcomed greater than one million guests, together with devotees just like the actor Michael Imperioli, the artist Laurie Anderson and the musician Moby, in addition to legions of typical New Yorkers.
“There was one lady particularly who would come each day when the museum was open,” Elena Pakhoutova, the Shrine Room’s curator and a senior curator of Himalayan artwork on the Rubin, mentioned in an interview. Round 11 a.m., this customer would seem, go on to the Shrine Room, sit there for quarter-hour after which go away. “That was her observe,” Pakhoutova mentioned.
An excellent wider public could flock to the house after its relocation and reopening, which have been fastidiously chosen: This yr, June 11 is Saga Dawa Duchen, which in Tibetan tradition marks the Buddha’s start, enlightenment and demise. The Rubin selected the Brooklyn Museum for its giant, numerous viewers and its on-site admissions coverage — pay what you’ll be able to — which ensures the Shrine Room’s accessibility.
“We’re going to have lots of people who uncover the Shrine Room accidentally,” Cummins, the Brooklyn curator, mentioned. “And I believe that’s going to be type of magical for lots of them — to run throughout this room the place artwork is displayed in such an immersive approach that’s so totally different from how we present artwork within the adjoining areas.”
As in its unique location, the room has no labels. The Brooklyn Museum has stationed a big contact display screen exterior, the place guests can faucet on the objects in a picture of the Shrine Room to study their historical past — a virtual exploration that’s on the museum’s web site as nicely.
However the reincarnated Shrine Room additionally differs from the unique. Due to house constraints, two of its most imposing items, the richly painted picket Wrathful Shrine Doors, thought to have come from a small Nineteenth-century Tibetan shrine devoted to the fierce protector god Mahakala — he stares from their floor — now sit simply exterior the room.
It additionally has transformations inside. The Rubin rotated the room’s objects — virtually all come from its own collection — each two years to replicate every of Tibetan Buddhism’s 4 primary traditions, a observe the Brooklyn Museum will proceed. On the time the Rubin closed, the Shrine Room featured the Kagyu custom. Now it embodies the newer Geluk tradition, and all of its thangkas and about half of its sculptures have been changed.
Geluk is “identified for its studying and scholarship,” Pakhoutova mentioned. The room’s items that are actually occurring view for the primary time since 2015 embody a Twentieth-century metalwork statue portraying Tsongkhapa, the custom’s 14th-century founder, in addition to an 1800s silk brocade thangka depicting Tara, a feminine Buddha.
“She tends to be somebody that you just pray to for form of worldly worries, lengthy life, well being,” Cummins mentioned.
Being amongst such objects can’t assist impressing guests who wander in, she noticed.
“It’s transporting,” Cummins mentioned. “It’s like entering into Tibet for a second.”
