ASIA WEEK NEW YORK AUTUMN 2024 EXHIBITION
Iskandar and the talking tree (detail), folio from the Great Mongol Shahnama (Book of kings), Iran, probably Tabriz, Ilkhanid dynasty, ca. 1330, ink, color, and gold on paper, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Freer Collection, Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1935.23
An Epic of Kings: The Great Mongol Shahnama
September 21, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Monumental in size and boldly illustrated, the Great Mongol Shahnama is one of the most celebrated of all medieval Persian manuscripts. Considered Iran’s national epic, the Shahnama (Book of kings) was completed by the poet Firdawsi around 1010. The copy known as the Great Mongol Shahnama was made three hundred years later, likely commissioned by Abu Sa‘id of the Ilkhanid dynasty, a branch of the Mongol Empire that ruled over Iran and West Asia. Between the manuscript’s covers, art, power, and history intertwined.
The Shahnama recounts the story of Iran from the beginning of time through the fall of the Sasanian dynasty in the seventh century. The illustrations in the Great Mongol Shahnama emphasize historical kings of Iran’s past, including Alexander the Great, known in Persian as Iskandar, and the pre-Islamic Sasanian monarchs, such as Ardashir I, Bahram Gur (Bahram V), and Kasra Anushirvan (Khusraw I Anushirvan). These figures served as role models to the Ilkhanid rulers, and the manuscript’s impressive paintings demonstrate how the Ilkhanids inserted themselves into Iran’s history.
An Epic of Kings offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see twenty-five folios from this now dismantled manuscript. It is also the first exhibition to present paintings from the Great Mongol Shahnama alongside contemporaneous works from China, the Mediterranean, and the Latin West. Experience this unique historical moment of cultural exchange across Eurasia—where commodities, people, and ideas circulated like never before—with Iran at its center.
To learn more, click here.
Related Event:
Zoom Talk: Alexander the Great between East and West
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
12-1pm
Throughout history, many authors have recounted Alexander the Great’s deeds and quests, real or fictional. In Iran, Alexander is known as Iskandar, and because of his Persian ancestry he is recognized as a legitimate ruler. In Europe, he is a model of virtue and piety for Christian rulers. In both traditions, Alexander is a relentless adventurer who journeys to the end of the world in an unsuccessful quest for immortality.
Join curator Simon Rettig and professor Mark Cruse as they explore Alexander’s centrality in the cultures of the global late Middle Ages, focusing on fourteenth-century illustrated manuscripts of Firdawsi’s Shahnama (Book of kings) and copies of the Romance of Alexander from the contemporaneous Latin West.
This program is held in conjunction with their exhibition An Epic of Kings: The Great Mongol Shahnama, now on view through January 12, 2025.
To learn more and register, click here.
Dr. Simon Rettig is the associate curator for the arts of the Islamic World at NMAA. Since he joined the museum in 2012, Rettig has curated several exhibitions, including Nasta‘liq: The Genius of Persian Calligraphy (2014), The Prince and the Shah: Royal Portraits from Qajar Iran (2018), and An Epic of Kings: The Great Mongol Shahnama (September 21, 2024–January 12, 2025). His current projects include a major exhibition on the history of Persian painting and a monograph on the Freer Gallery of Art Collection’s celebrated manuscript of Nizami’s Khusraw u Shirin from the Jalayirid period.
Dr. Mark Cruse is associate professor of French in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. His research and teaching are driven by an interest in the relationship between textual production, material culture, and transcultural contact in the global Middle Ages. Professor Cruse has published on topics including the medieval legend of Alexander the Great, manuscript illumination, medieval theater, the senses in medieval culture, heraldry, and the history of color. His book The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221–1422 will be published in February 2025 with Cornell University Press. He is currently writing a book on the medieval origins of French colonialism.
Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea
December 9, 2023 – 2026
Japan’s rich history of ceramic artistry developed in large part alongside the culture of drinking tea. Japanese tea practitioners initially used Chinese and Korean antique ceramics as tea bowls but began using newly made Japanese tea bowls, such as Raku ware, in the sixteenth century. Unlike most tea bowls, Raku ceramics are built by hand—a process described as “knotting clay”—as opposed to using a wheel. Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea explores these distinctive, hand-molded ceramics and their close relationship to Japanese tea culture. This exhibition features tea bowls, water containers, and other vessels in the museum’s permanent collection that demonstrate the glazes and forms unique to Raku ware.
Ōsumi Yukie (b. 1945), Wave Crests (Namiho), Japan, Heisei era, 2008, hammered silver with nunomezõgan (textile imprint inlay) in lead and gold, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Bequest of Shirley Z. Johnson, S2022.8.32a–d
Striking Objects: Contemporary Japanese Metalwork
March 2, 2024 – January 11, 2026
Contemporary Japanese metalworking breathes life into traditional methods that have been passed down and practiced over generations. The artists featured in Striking Objects create masterpieces that combine tradition with creativity and innovation. The exhibition highlights works from the collection of Shirley Z. Johnson (1940–2021), distinguished lawyer, philanthropist, and former board member of the National Museum of Asian Art. Her passion for contemporary Japanese metalwork and her visionary gift have made the National Museum of Asian Art home to the largest collection of such works in the United States.
Do Ho Suh: Public Figures
April 27, 2024 – April 29, 2029
To usher in the next century of the National Museum of Asian Art, artist Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, South Korea) was commissioned to create a special edition of his work Public Figures to be installed in front of the museum and facing the National Mall in Washington, DC. Internationally recognized for his large-scale installations, Suh was among the earliest contemporary artists featured in the museum’s groundbreaking Pavilion exhibition series and his work will be the first new sculpture to be installed outside the historic Freer Gallery of Art in over three decades.
Body Image: Arts of the Indian Subcontinent
Ongoing
The human body, particularly the beautiful body, is central to artistic expression on the Indian subcontinent. Through the body, artists express fundamental beliefs about the nature of being, social ideals, gender roles, and hierarchies of power, both earthly and divine. The subcontinent, which extends from Pakistan eastward to Bangladesh and from Nepal southward to Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, has long been culturally and religiously diverse. By grouping and juxtaposing masterpieces from the museum’s collection, this exhibition explores concepts and aesthetics of the body.
Detail, Book cover, probably for the Dharani Samgraha (Collection of Dharani-Mantras), Nepal, 1650–1700, opaque watercolor on wood, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joyce and Kenneth Robbins, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, S2000.88.1–2
The Art of Knowing in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas
Ongoing
The Art of Knowing brings together highlights from our collections, some of which have never been on view, to explore religious and practical knowledge across time, space, and cultures. Featuring stone sculptures, gilt bronzes, and painted manuscripts from India, Nepal, Tibet, Bangladesh, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia, this exhibition illuminates the critical role of visual culture in conveying Buddhist and Hindu teachings from the ninth to the twentieth centuries.
From Ganesha, the god of beginnings, to goddesses who personify wisdom, the artworks on view tell individual stories and reveal ways of knowing the world. “The Art of Knowing” asks how artists and objects shape wisdom traditions. How do shared images and designs reveal the movement of people and ideas across geographical regions? What do goddesses teach? And how does attaining knowledge end suffering?
Art and Industry: China’s Ancient Houma Foundry
Ongoing
The largest bronze foundry complex from antiquity was excavated at Houma in northern China in the mid-twentieth century. At the two-acre site, archaeologists discovered evidence of extremely sophisticated manufacturing techniques.The facility was established around 585 BCE by the rulers of the State of Jin, who remained its chief patrons for about 150 years. Houma produced ornamented objects with complex, abstract designs, inlay, and what is now considered to be the earliest pictorial narratives in China. More than half of the objects featured in this exhibition were made at Houma. Other pieces illustrate the factory’s long-lasting influence and legacy that extended into the Western Han period (206 BCE–9 CE).
Rediscovering Korea’s Past
Ongoing
Today we admire the translucent gray-green celadon glaze on Korean ceramics of the Goryeo period as one of the great achievements of world potters. In the late 19th century, long-respected tombs of royal figures and nobility from the Goryeo period (935–1392) became vulnerable to looting and were sold in the antiquities market. American doctor and diplomat Horace Newton Allen witnessed this rediscovery while he lived in Seoul from 1884 to 1905, and he formed his own sizeable collection of celadon, it seems, from objects on the open market. Charles Lang Freer purchased Allen’s collection in 1907 and sparked his
deep interest in this distinguished Korean ware. In turn, Allen, Freer, and other early collectors inspired generations of scholars to clarify the styles and dating of Goryeo celadon. Archaeologists have now identified and excavated the kiln complexes at Gangjin and Buan, which produced the finest celadon wares during the Goryeo dynasty.
Afterlife: Ancient Chinese Jades
Ongoing
A construction boom in China more than a century ago resulted in new railways and factories—and the accidental discovery of scores of rich ancient cemeteries. Buried in these tombs for thousands of years were jewelry and ritual objects, all laboriously crafted from jade. When Charles Lang Freer acquired many of them, their precise age was unknown. The modern science of archaeology was not practiced in China until 1928, when the Smithsonian sponsored its introduction. With the advent of archaeology came a better appreciation of the evolution of ancient Chinese mortuary culture and China’s art history.
Today we know these jades represent the earliest epochs of Chinese civilization, the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Many came from the prehistoric burials of the Liangzhu culture (circa 3300–2250 BCE). These Stone Age people flourished in a large, fertile region between the modern cities of Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. The graves they left behind now function like time capsules, providing insight into the dynamic character of ancient Chinese civilization during life and after death.
Freer’s Global Network: Artists, Collectors, and Dealers
Ongoing
This exhibition looks closely at the interconnected web of artists, dealers, and collectors who helped shape the Freer Gallery of Art’s collection amid the shifting political and economic environment of the early twentieth century. Learn about some of the fascinating characters who played instrumental roles in museum founder Charles Lang Freer’s global network, including art dealers Bunkio Matsuki and Dikran Kelekian, collector Agnes Meyer, and artist Mary Chase Perry Stratton. The captivating display of objects in this gallery, which includes American paintings and stoneware, Japanese ceramics, ancient Chinese bronzes, and Near Eastern pottery, illustrates that network in operation.
Read more about Freer’s Global Network, click here
Prehistoric Spirals: Earthenware from Thailand
Ongoing
Red painted spirals swirl across the surfaces of these vessels, testifying to the sophisticated material and aesthetic cultures of northeastern Thailand more than two thousand years ago. Their makers belonged to a loose network of settlements specializing in bronze and ceramic production. Recent research into their materials, techniques, and designs opens new lines of inquiry into the region’s heritage and its profound cultural and material legacy.
Peacock Room Shutters Open Every Third Thursday of the Month
Ongoing
See the Peacock Room in a whole new light! Please join us for a beloved NMAA tradition: our third Thursday opening of the Peacock Room shutters. Experience this unique masterwork of art and design in a whole new way as natural light reveals details of James McNeill Whistler’s painted interior and accents the gleaming surfaces of Charles Lang Freer’s collection of Asian ceramics.
The shutters are open from noon to 5:30 p.m. every third Thursday of each month.
Free, no registration required.
The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room
Ongoing through 2025
The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room includes more than two hundred bronzes, paintings, silk hangings, and carpets that were created in Tibet, China, and Mongolia between the thirteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arranged to reflect Tibetan Buddhist concepts and customs rather than museum conventions, the glittering room evokes the Himalayan portals that bridge the mundane and the sacred worlds.
The objects, assembled by collector Alice S. Kandell over many years, are placed on painted furniture, arranged among paintings and textiles, and presented without labels. With an aural dimension of chanting monks, this dynamic and densely layered display restores the relationships between Buddhist figures and viewers that are typically dissolved within museums.
To view all exhibitions, click here.
