The Rubin’s Celebrated Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room Finds a New Home at the the Brooklyn Museum

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room was one of the most popular exhibitions at the Rubin’s 17th Street building in New York City, experienced by more than one million visitors from the year it opened in 2015 until the building’s closure in 2024. In a commitment to ensure New York City communities and visitors continue to have access to the Rubin’s collection, the Shrine Room will find a new home at the Brooklyn Museum’s Arts of Asia galleries. Opening in June 2025, it will launch a six-year collaboration between the institutions that includes collection sharing and curatorial exchange.

Jorrit Britschgi, executive director at the Rubin, said: “The guiding principle of our borderless future is: more art, accessible to more people, in more places. We are so thrilled that the beating heart of our 17th Street building, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, will continue to have an exceptional home in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum, accessible by their hundreds of thousands of annual visitors from local communities and around the world.”

About the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room

More than 100 works of art and ritual objects from the Rubin’s collection are presented as they would be in an elaborate private household shrine, where devotees make offerings, pray, contemplate, and perform rituals. The design of the Shrine Room showcases these objects in an immersive environment that incorporates elements of traditional Tibetan architecture and the color schemes of Tibetan homes.

The Shrine Room evokes the aesthetics and atmosphere of a traditional Tibetan sacred space and offers visitors the opportunity to experience Tibetan religious art in its cultural context. It features scroll paintings known as thangkas, sculptures, ritual items, and musical instruments arranged on traditional Tibetan furniture according to the hierarchy they assume in Tibetan Buddhist practices. 

Read more in the press release.