• Ancient Bronzes of the Asian Grasslands from the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation

• A Spectacle of Wings: Photographs by Rosalie Winard

• Asian Art from the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation

Ancient Bronzes of the Asian Grasslands from the
Arthur M. Sackler Foundation

2 September - 14 December 2008

Ancient Bronzes of the Asian Grasslands brings to life the complex cultures that flourished across an enormous expanse of territory from northern China and Mongolia into Eastern Europe, and reveals the cross-pollination of cultures throughout a vast region.

This exhibition focuses on the eastern or Asian steppes whose rolling grassy plains are punctuated by snow-topped mountain ranges like the Tien Shan (Heavenly Mountains), and deserts like the Gobi and Taklamakan.In 2000 BCE, villages of farmers, hunters, and fisherman populated the grasslands. Six centuries later, many people had left their villages to range over the territory managing herds of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses. Horses, first domesticated in the steppes, were integral to this new way of life. By 900 BCE, the steppe dwellers, now legendary as riders and breeders, began to supply horses to the empires of eastern and western Asia. The famous trade routes linking Asia and Europe in ancient times, such as the Silk Road that connected China and Rome, traversed the grasslands. By guiding and supplying the trade caravans, the steppe dwellers played an essential role in the exchange of goods and ideas between East and West.

These small-scale personal objects were eminently portable, reflecting the lifestyles of these horse-riding nomads. They reveal how the steppe dwellers relied upon the animal kingdom as a primary source of symbolic imagery to indicate tribe, social rank, and connection to the spirit world.

Animal motifs including lively antlered stags, horses, camels, deer, and ferocious wild boars and birds of prey abound. While some animals were tribal or clan totems, other fantastic creatures may refer to myths, epics, and legends, aspects of religious beliefs now forgotten.This exhibition of spectacular ancient bronzes from the Asian steppes is drawn from the renowned collections of the late Arthur M. Sackler (1913–1987), a research psychiatrist, medical publisher, connoisseur, and art collector. It was organized by Trudy S. Kawami, Director of Research for the Sackler. Foundation, which was established by Dr. Sackler in 1965 to make his extensive collections widely accessible to the public.

A Spectacle of Wings:

Photographs by Rosalie Winard

9 September - 14 December 2008

“Beauty can be a tool if used well,” Rosalie Winard says, and it is a tool that she wields with a distinctive touch. She photographs birds as one might a family member caught in an intimate moment, and her avian portraits have been praised as both meditative and exhilarating. “It was the spring of my freshman year of college when I opened my heart to the birds….

Off in the distance a solitary brown pelican appeared…. That morning as I watched the pelican’s ancient form dip and glide, the world slowed down for the very first time.” Rosalie Winard’s captivation with birds would follow her inexorably as she moved away from her early thoughts of being an ornithologist, into the study of music, and on to careers in documentary film, teaching video art, and photojournalism.

Winard first viewed birds through different lenses. “It was in an environmental biology course that binoculars became my second set of eyes,” remarks Winard. The camera later replaced her binoculars as she searched for ways to depict the birds' elusive aspects and paradoxes: their simultaneous fragility and power, tranquility and action, elegance and humor.

A self-taught documentary photographer, artist, and student of natural history, Winard, in each of her images, slips soundlessly into a vivid and detailed realism.

Rosalie Winard counts more painters among her influences than photographers, and her choice of infrared film produces an effect reminiscent of a charcoal drawing with its grainy textures and tones of gray, black, and white.

Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, and Edouard Vuillard inspire her as an artist, though their work is utterly different from her own. It’s the “shared essence, the sense of shared concerns” that Winard cites as she likens her image of a great egret with breeding plumage to a painting by Vuillard of his mother and sister in an interior. The swooning ethereal bird, white in a sea of incandescent foliage, brings to Winard’s mind the small canvas in which the artist’s sister, also interwoven with her environment, seems to emerge from the patterned wallpaper.

It was award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris who put her onto the possibilities of the infrared film that she has used to great effect in her bird portraits. “In a way, it’s counterintuitive,” Winard explains. “The best times to shoot birds are at dawn and dusk. This film needs bright light, but there was an essence. Finally, visually, I was seeing what I felt.”

The technical aspects of her work, though, are only a means to an end. As naturalist writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams noted in an essay in Winard’s recent book on wetland birds: “First and foremost, Rosalie Winard is an artist of restoration. Through the act of witnessing these fragile, enduring birds of America’s wetlands, she refuses to let their noble and imperiled lives remain hidden.”

Her extraordinary photographs bring to the fore not only the poetic splendor of these magical creatures, but a heightened awareness of the precarious habitats that support their existence. “With already half of the world’s wetlands gone, we need a new mindset that appreciates the wetlands as water’s source and storage instead of land to be drained and developed,” said Jamie Pittock, of the World Wildlife Fund. As both artist and activist, Rosalie Winard uses these images of what she calls her “avian primitives” to heighten awareness of that need.

The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Biology Department, and the Center for the Environment.

The exhibition accompanied the publication of WILD BIRDS OF THE AMERICAN WETLANDS by Rosalie Winard (Welcome Books). Mount Holyoke College alumni can receive a 10% discount to the book by contacting www.welcomebooks.com.

Asian Art from the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation
Ongoing

This remarkable selection of Asian art, on long-term loan from the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in New York, is on view in the Norah Warbeke Gallery. In 1965, Dr. Sackler (1913-1987), a research psychiatrist, medical publisher, connoisseur and collector of art, established the foundation to make his extensive art collections accessible to the public by lending art to museums and creating traveling exhibitions to promote understanding and enjoyment of Asian art.

Following the museum's recent expansion and renovation, curator Wendy Watson received a call from Trudy S. Kawami, director of research for the Sackler Foundation. Kawami wondered if Mount Holyoke would be interested in a long-term loan of several works of art to display alongside its own growing Asian collection. Watson and director Marianne Doezema traveled to New York to investigate. After consultation with various faculty members about curricular applications, a list of possibilities was forwarded to the foundation.

Chinese Camel

Soon afterwards 16 works of art were conserved and packed for the trip to South Hadley. Among them are four sculptures: a spectacular Thai bronze Buddha (15th-16th century); a Chinese polychrome wood Guanyin figure, probably dating to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD); and two stunning glazed ceramic Tang funerary sculptures (618-908 AD), one representing a camel and the other a court official. Ten other ceramic objects include a dramatically-patterned Neolithic Chinese storage jar (2nd-3rd millennium BC), a green glazed censer vessel of the Han Dynasty (25-220 AD), and two beautiful stoneware vases of the Song dynasty.

Six additional ceramics represent the artistic achievements of Iran, and range in date from the first millennium BC to the Seljuk and Safavid periods (13th and 17th centuries). Those are installed in the Museum's Asian Gallery.

Chinese Funerary storage jar

All of these objects will enrich the college's curriculum in several departments and programs including art history, religion, history, and Asian Studies. Jonathan Lipman, professor of East Asian history at Mount Holyoke, examined the objects during their installation recently and remarked "I can easily imagine using these marvelous works of art to study the transmission and visual presentation of Buddhism, the interaction of Chinese and Central Asian cultures, and the aesthetics of everyday life in East Asia. We'll visit the museum at least two or three times this semester as part of my Introduction to Chinese Civilization course."

Throughout his life, Arthur Sackler was an avid student of art and art history. "One wonderful day in 1950," he wrote, "I came upon some Chinese ceramics and Ming furniture. My life has not been the same since." Asian art, especially Chinese bronze and jade, came to form the core of the Arthur M. Sackler Collections. Ultimately, they included art from China, Korea, Cambodia, India, Japan, and ancient Iran, as well as Italian Renaissance maiolica and European terracotta sculpture from the 14th to the 20th centuries.

Furthering his commitment to the arts, Sackler endowed galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University and supported the construction of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard. With his brothers, he funded the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to house the renowned Temple of Dendur. In 1987 he was the principal benefactor of the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., a national museum of Asian art and part of the Smithsonian Institution.

Top of page