The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces tours, talks and workshops in conjunction with the exhibition Realms of Earth and Sky: Indian Paintings from the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Century. All events are free and open to the public.
Public Tour
Thursday, April 2, 6 p.m.
Tour of Realms of Earth and Sky with Gabriela Perez-Dietz '15 as part of her spring 2015 Independent Study with Saleema Waraich, Assistant Professor of Art History. An Art History and Anthropology double major, Perez-Dietz has been exploring museum education and the Realms of Earth and Sky exhibition.
Lecture with Molly Aitken and Dipti Khera
Thursday, April 2, 7 p.m.
Two leading scholars of Rajput painting—Molly Aitken, Associate Professor of Art History at The City College of New York, and Dipti Khera, Assistant Professor of Art History at New York University—will lecture on pleasure in Rajput painting, and will discuss how pleasure was both invoked within and also extended beyond the confines of the page. Made possible by the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency Fund.
Curator’s Tour
Tuesday, April 14, noon
Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs, and Saleema Waraich, Assistant Professor of Art History at Skidmore College, lead a tour of Realms of Earth and Sky.
Talha Rathore and Hiba Schahbaz
Talk: Thursday, April 16, 7:30 p.m.
Workshop: Friday, April 17, 12-2 p.m. and 2:30-4:30 p.m.
Artists Talha Rathore and Hiba Schahbaz will speak about the traditional techniques in Realms of Earth and Sky and the ways in which each has modernized and personalized the miniature tradition in their practice. Made possible by the Alfred Z. Solomon Residency Fund. Reservations are required for the workshops and may be made by calling 518-580-8080.
About Molly Aiken
Molly Emma Aitken Ph.D. is a specialist in Asian art history, in particular the arts of South Asia. She has curated traveling exhibitions on South Asian jewelry and contemporary folk quilts, and has published numerous articles on Mughal and Rajput painting. Aitken received CAA's Charles Rufus Morey book award in 2011 and the AAS Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012 for her book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.) Currently focused on the late 16th and early 17th centuries, she is looking at Mughal receptions of Rajput court arts in the context of social pleasure. She teaches at the City College of New York.
About Dipti Khera
Dipti Khera earned her Ph.D. in South Asian art history. She has published articles and essays on 19th century Indian metalwork and early 19th century Rajasthani painting. She has worked with several museums including, most recently, the Arthur M. Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C., and the City Palace Museum, Udaipur, India, with which she is developing an exhibition that reveals the major shift in Indian art represented by Udaipur painters’ engagement with conceptualizing place and representing reality in large-scale works in the 18th and 19th century. She teaches at New York University.
About Talha Rathore
Talha Rathore graduated from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan in 1995, specializing in the art of miniature painting. Currently based in Brooklyn, her work explores a variety of anxieties and dichotomies that emerge out of the immigrant experience and the quest to belong, poignantly articulated in a series of works made on New York subway maps. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut; and World Bank Art Gallery, Washington DC. Her paintings have been shown in various galleries in Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Malaysia, Japan, Morocco, Dubai, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
About Hiba Schahbaz
Hiba Schahbaz trained in the art of miniature painting at the National College of Arts (Lahore, Pakistan) and graduated in 2003. In 2012, she completed a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Museum Studies from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Through the language of miniature painting, she pursues issues of self-identification, and in the process, she contemporizes and re-contextualizes “traditional” miniature painting. The subjects of her work derive from personal narratives and her relationship with her surroundings. Merging the symbolism and iconography of the contemporary world with the traditional techniques and styles she learned at NCA, her paintings fuse the real with the imagined, resulting in fantastical landscapes. She has exhibited her work internationally, in addition to curating exhibitions of miniature paintings in Pakistan and India.
About Realms of Earth and Sky
From the opulence of the Mughal court to stories of gods in human form, from battle scenes to intimate depictions of courtly love, the historic South Asian paintings in Realms of Earth and Sky offer visitors a chance to explore important cultural narratives that remain central to living belief systems on the Indian subcontinent. Portraiture, religious and literary texts, ragamala paintings, and works from both Mughal and Rajput traditions are represented in meticulously rendered tableaux contained in the small scale of manuscript or album pages.