Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas Archives - Page 2 of 2

Words on Water: Indian Writers in Conversation

Seattle Art Museum on Jul 11 2012

After outstanding conversations last summer, Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas is once again teaming up with Elliott Bay Book Company and Teamwork Productions of Delhi, India to provide two stimulating evenings of discussion in Volunteer Park. Each night, writers from India engage in dialogue with local writers of Indian origin.

Tonight- Wednesday July 11th, from 6:30 to 9 join M.J. Akbar, an acclaimed journalist and the Editiorial Director of India Today as he shares his views on the subcontinent and his life as a journalist alongside fellow journalist Shiraz Sidhva. There will be time for discussion with the audience following their discussion.

Tomorrow Night- Thursday July 12th, from 6:30 to 9 enjoy first Nayanjot Lahiri, a Professor of History at the University of Delhi and author of The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization and Finding Forgotten Cities as he is joined for discussion by Vikram Prakash, Professor of Architecture at the UW. Next, Urvashi Butalia, the co-founder of India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, will discuss India’s partition and more with Sonora Jha, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Seattle University.

Both evenings will be held in Stimson Auditorium and tickets ($7 members, $12 non-members) include Chai break and light refreshments.

We hope to see you there!

-Seattle Asian Art Museum

Food and Faith in Japan

Seattle Art Museum on Jan 25 2012

A fascinating series of lectures will be offered at the Seattle Asian Art Museum on two topics that have increasingly entered the purview of art historians across the world: food and ritual in relation to art.

Japanese culture, both ancient and modern, is rich in elements of ritual display. Foods, drink, implements for ceremonial performance, and a wide range of display objects such as lacquer and ceramics are found on temple and shrine altars. Paintings extoll the sins and virtues of various foods—often in encoded visual subtexts. Mochi, which many of us know as a frozen ice cream treat, traces its origins to secular rituals for harvest or the New Year and religious rites in ancient Japan. Paintings in the Seattle Art Museum collections transport us back in time to the days when wrongly accused courtiers and statesmen took vengeance on the perpetrators of injustice and were pacified only by regular ceremonies at court or posthumous enshrinement at Shinto jinja.

Professor Cynthea J. Bogel (East Asian visual culture and art history, University of Washington) has organized colleagues, community, and students to form a creative collaboration that explores ritual, foods, objects of display, and medieval Japanese painting side by side. Working with the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle artist and cultural anthropologist Julia Harrison, and input from Seattle’s Asian-American artist and confectionary-making community, four lectures will be offered at the Seattle Asian Art Museum free of charge.

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Spend Your Summer with SAM

Seattle Art Museum on Jun 30 2011

People in Seattle make the most of the all-too-short summers and so does SAM! We’ve got a diverse array of art exhibitions, events and experiences at all three of our sites this summer. Whether you’re interested in Bollywood, baseball, yoga or landscape painting, we’ve got you covered.

Sacred Sites of Asia series at SAAM

sarahl on Sep 24 2010

The Gardner Center for Asian Art and Ideas kicks off a second year of programs with a series of outstanding speakers on Sacred Sites of Asia! These nine sessions are a sampling of new perspectives and images, from the Angkor Wat temple of Cambodia, to an Australian aboriginal forest, Buddhist caves of the Chinese Gobi Desert, and Zen monasteries.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

sarahl on Jun 21 2010

William Dalrymple’s new book with this title just became available in the U.S. a couple of days ago. As intriguing, illuminating and playful as his previous books (The Last Mughal, White Mughals, City of Djinns and more), it is also a mix of historical storytelling, travel adventures, and deep insight.

We are lucky enough to have him coming to speak next Thursday, June 24, at 7 pm at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, thanks to Elliott Bay Books and Random House.

An Entrancing Music of Pakistan and India

sarahl on Apr 9 2010

Those who went to the Meany Hall concert of Pakistani musician Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in 1993 will still remember the thrill of hearing his voice and his group—with the audience dancing, and dollar bills being thrown onto the stage! It was a taste of the power of qawwali, the musical tradition of Sufis in Pakistan and India.

Buddhism and Human Rights–Is This a Conflict?

sarahl on Apr 1 2010

We have heard more details recently about the ongoing war in isolated Burma [Myanmar]–especially this week in Seattle. Human rights reporter Mac McClelland was here, talking about her experiences living in Thailand by the Burmese border, an area swollen with refugee camps. She lived with Burmese dissidents, members of one of the ethnic groups targeted by Burmese government genocide, who risk their lives regularly by secretly crossing into Burma to document atrocities of the government’s ethnic-cleansing campaign.