Past Exhibitions
Tea Pots and Butter Tubs: Tibetan Vessels
February 26 - December 31, 2006
Curator: Sarah Johnson, Ph.D.
For the first time, rare and historic containers from the Museum's collection were exhibited to highlight the food and drink of traditional Tibetan culture. The objects presented included a set of elaborate tea servers decorated with mythical creatures and deities, ornate metal and wood butter tubs amd mugs used for storing yak butter and for serving chang (barley beer), and other serving bowls and utensils customarily used to hold tsampa (toasted flour) and momos (roasted barley dumplings). The exhibition also included an 18th century tea brick belonging to the 7th Dalai Lama, Kelsang Gyatso (1708-1757). This exhibit is sponsored, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Exploring Tibet: In Search of the Salween
Presented at Jacques Marchais Museum, April 10, 2005 -December 31, 2005
Presented at Snug Harbor Culutral Center June 17, 2006 -October 28, 2006
Curator: Sarah Johnson, Ph.D.
Salween River (Gyamo Ngochu), Kham. Photo by John Hanbury-Tracy
This exhibition of photographs from a 1935–1936 expedition to the remotest area of eastern Tibet recorded the adventures of 25 year old John Hanbury-Tracy and Ronald Kaulbeck, who, with the backing of the British Royal Geographical Society, went in search of the source of the Salween River.
For eighteen months, Hanbury-Tracy and Kaulbeck had no contact with the outside world as they traveled across an unforgiving, unmapped terrain. They set off in February 1935. By January 1936, the cold—so intense that it was almost impossible to use their survey equipment with accuracy- and war in China forced them to turn back. However, they succeeded in mapping 25,000 square miles, and brought back numerous specimens of plant and insect life as well as photographs and descriptions of Tibetan life and culture.
Hanbury-Tracy, who died in 1971, published a story of his trip in his 1938 book, Black River of Tibet. Kaulbeck also published an account, Salween. Describing his first sighting of the Salween, Hanbury-Tracy reported, “We has been riding all day in a tearing wind, huddled in our Tibetan sheep-skin clothes, experiencing the first dead dry cold of a Tibetan winter, the cold of the loftiest plateau on earth.” Highlights from their texts accompanied a selection of their photographs.
The images bring to life impressions of local villages, “tiny clusters of flat-roofed houses built of mud and stone,” the river’s rope bridges, New Year’s dances, sturdy yaks, and the people of the upper Salween valley. These photographs record aspects of Tibetan culture now lost through political and cultural transformation of the region, most notably in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Please contact Sarah Johnson, Ph.D., Curator, with any questions about this exhibition.
Mustang: The Lost Tibetan Kingdom, Photographs by Don Gurewitz
On View May 20, 2006 - November 28, 2006
This exhibit is drawn from a photographic documentation of a trek into what some anthropologists have called "the last forbidden kingdom". Award-winning photographer Don Gurewitz and his group hiked and rode ponies for a week through the deepest canyon in the world, surrounded by spectacular glacial peaks on either side, to reach the medieval walled city of Lo Manthang, the capital of the Tibetan Kingdom of Mustang.
Mustang is a semisecret, semi-independent and semi-feudal region of Nepal, nestled on the Himalayan border with Tibet. It has been closed to the outside world until very recently, and, even today, special permission is needed to enter. One of the only surviving Tibetan monarchies, and almost totally isolated for decades, it is perhaps the most intact Tibetan culture in the world.
The exhibit presents a gripping and evocative insight into an isolated and ancient culture that few Westerners have ever seen. For more information about Don Gurewitz, please visit his website at www.dongurewitzphotography.com.
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