The Invention of ""Tibetan Contemporary Art""

Clare Harris, a leading authority on Tibetan and Himalayan visual culture, is Reader in Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Curator for Asian Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. The subject of this short lunchtime lecture is drawn from her recently completed book The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet, which is to be published next year. She is also the author of In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959 (Reaktion Books, London 1999), the first study of “modern” Tibetan art. She has also worked on British colonial photography and was co-director of the project that created The Tibet Album, a website featuring 6000 historic photographs of Tibet, launched by the Dalai Lama in 2008.
The theater is set up café-style, allowing patrons to bring their lunch ordered from the Café@RMA downstairs into the theater. This is a half-hour talk, followed by a Q&A.
Ticket includes admission to all exhibitions, including
Tradition Transformed: Tibetan Artists Respond, which marks the first exhibition of contemporary Tibetan art in a New York City museum. The nine Tibetan artists featured each explore contemporary issues–personal, political, and cultural–by integrating the centuries-old traditional imagery, techniques, and materials found in Tibetan Buddhist art with modern influences and media.