During the Tibetan Shrine exhibition at the Sackler gallery in Washington, DC, at the foot of the staircase leading into the museum’s subterranean atrium, a red gateway drew visitors toward a small opening on the opposite, neutral wall. Introductory wall text explained that what lay inside approximated a shrine that an elite family in Tibet might have had in their home. Comprised of objects collected over several decades by Alice Kandell, the single-room shrine installation was an adaptation of what one might encounter in her New York home. Upon visiting Sikkim as a young woman, Kandell became fascinated by Tibetan visual and spiritual culture, an interest that—after 1959 and the subsequent diasporic movement of Tibetans—took on an urgency related to preserving the cultural heritage of this now-dispersed population.

This reconstruction of a family shrine, put together by Kandell and kept in trust for the Tibetan people, displayed a wide range of objects in a small space whose deep red walls were barely visible behind the numerous paintings, sculptures, textiles, and furnishings on display. In a family shrine, sculptures are added to mark important life events, joining a personalized lineage of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and lamas. Here, the curators’ selections and organization produced an internal consistency to the collector’s objects, placing, for example, monastic musical instruments at the right-hand side of the room, located underneath a speaker that filled the shrine with Tibetan devotional music. This atmospheric element underscored the experiential impetus of the installation.

The wall opposite the entry centered on the collection’s prized silver repoussé Shakyamuni Buddha sculpture (cat. I–11), which was surrounded by images of other Buddhas in teaching, meditative, or earth-touching gestures as well as lamas, including an eighteenth–nineteenth-century Mongolian example (cat. II–18). More teachers and adepts were arranged to the left and right of the central area, including one small image wearing textile garments. Female divinities, including several large Tara sculptures, appeared throughout the installation. Placed appropriately to the left side of the visitor, a dramatic, winged Supersecret Hayagriva Father-Mother (yab-yum) sculpture (cat. V–10), backed by the same subject in a large thangka, or painting on cloth (cat. V–11), anchored a grouping of fierce aspects of Tibetan divinities.

Thangkas covered much of the wall area, echoing the objects nearby, or sometimes blocked entirely by a sculpture placed in front of them. These paintings were carefully selected; three thangkas from a set of six illustrating arhats and attendants (cat. I–18) alternate with two other thangkas on the main wall. Often the connections between thangkas emerged through the similarities in their rich textile frames, which are rarely fully reproduced in catalogue images of these paintings but increasingly important for an understanding of the way these objects exist at the intersection of diverse Chinese, Tibetan, and Nepali imperial, cultural, and commercial pathways. Here, they served as visual links across the space, creating groups of images and linking floral patterns on textile borders to those painted on furniture.

Ritual implements sat in front of the hierarchically organized tiers of deities, the entire ensemble lit creatively to suggest candlelight. The furniture supporting these objects also iconographically underscored the thematic groupings, with a dramatic red offering chest (torgam) peeking out from behind the tantric implements and sculptures of the left-hand side of the shrine, the location for fierce images (cat. VII–15). The gilded and sculpted wood furnishings caught the low light of the gallery and linked the glow of the sculptures with the gold paint and threads found in many of the thangkas and appliquéd textile images (e.g., cat. II–15). The cumulative effect produced a rich, multifaceted texture surrounding the viewer. Decorative textile hangings added to this three-dimensionality and tactility. Long vertical banners alternated with objects as wall or platform covering, sometimes operating as their own discrete objects for contemplation ((96); see also Valrae Reynolds, From the Sacred Realm: Treasures of Tibetan Art from the Newark Museum, New York: Prestel, 1999, pl. 69). A protective canopy overhead kept the eye in the room, and small carpets covered the ground behind the railing, marking the transition from the viewer’s space to that of the shrine itself (textiles not in cat.).

The viewing area echoed the shrine in its intimacy: only ten or so viewers at a time could comfortably fit. Visitors could sit outside of the shrine on large museum benches where copies of the exhibition catalogue were provided to elucidate the unlabeled objects in the shrine itself. The shrine installation was paired with an exhibition of paintings by Situ Panchen (1700–1774), organized by the Rubin Museum of Art with its own catalogue by David P. Jackson (Patron and Painter: Situ Panchen and the Revival of the Encampment Style, New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2009).

Those wishing to extend their intimate encounter with Tibetan art and culture are encouraged to read through the extensive catalogue. After introductory statements by the Dalai Lama and Kandell, the catalogue’s two essays by Thurman and Marylin Rhie situate the Kandell collection within spiritual, historical, and art-historical frames. This collection’s focus on what Thurman calls the Ganden Renaissance (fifteenth–eighteenth centuries) raises new questions about syncretism, patronage, and collaboration that complicate the picture of Tibetan art history in this later period. Rhie’s essay guides readers century-by-century through the collection via its sculpture, noting the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century relationship to Indo-Nepali art; the importance of relations with China, particularly the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–1424); the rise of regional Tibetan styles in the sixteenth century; and the Tibetan reshaping of religion and visual culture in Mongolia and China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rhie links the objects in the collection with those in situ in Tibet, Mongolia, and China. Both here and in individual catalogue entries, Rhie helps to train the reader’s eye to see the subtle shifts in decoration, drapery, and sculptural execution. The catalogue is sumptuously illustrated with well-chosen details, translations and transcriptions of the inscriptions on the works, and clear discussion of the iconography and regional provenance of the objects. It is divided into seven thematic groupings that do not parallel the groupings in the shrine itself but instead provide an alternate path through the material. Each section begins with an introductory image of the objects in Kandell’s home, and a tri-fold insert in the back cover provides a further photographic overview. The shrine in the museum included only selected objects from the catalogue; thus the catalogue operates as a complement to and extension of the experience rather than as a record of the display as shown at the Sackler.

A close reading of the installation revealed the care and attention paid to the shrine’s arrangement; but aside from the introductory wall text the Kandell shrine as a whole presented an experience unmediated by overt curatorial direction, one that invited visitors to step into a reconstruction of a Tibetan shrine, offering them explanation through an ineffable spiritual and aesthetic connection with the objects. The shrine was consecrated prior to the opening of the exhibition by the monk Lobsana Jampa, with photographs and a short video of the consecration uploaded to the museum’s Facebook pages. The shrine joined other similar attempts to bring religious settings into the institution of the museum, an impulse often associated with Tibetan art. The Newark Museum’s altar, in both its early manifestation built under the Federal Emergency Relief program in 1935 and its current form, decorated by artist-in-residence Phuntsok Dorje and consecrated by the 14th Dalai Lama in 1990, are earlier examples of this mode of display (see Reynolds, From the Sacred Realm). Private collectors of Tibetan art, like Kandell, often bring works together in their homes to emulate shrines. These reinterpretations of Tibetan objects probe and question the ostensible boundary between aesthetic and spiritual, a boundary often reinforced in a museum context. The contrast between the Freer’s aesthetically focused South Asian installation and the shrine installed in the Sackler next door highlights the dynamic range of interactions possible in a museum context.

Pairing the Kandell and Situ Panchen exhibitions offered opportunities for dialogue about these display practices. Visitors to both might have reconsidered a “traditional” gallery’s circumambulatory pathway and its secular worship via historical, biographical, and art-historical belief systems in contrast to the shrine where the installation surrounded the viewer. Having visited the painting exhibit, the Kandell shrine might have thwarted some visitors’ desires to study the works carefully—many of the paintings were completely obscured, or so far away that details could only be seen by looking at the catalogue photographs. Were the works not worthy of close study? Other visitors might have been frustrated that they could not interact with the objects in distinctively Buddhist ways, finding themselves in a museum context and therefore unable to make offerings, burn incense, or light candles. What constitutes a proper way of seeing for these objects?

The experience in the shrine might also lead some to question why it seems more often the case that museum shrines are constructed for those regions of the world remote from the northern Atlantic, thereby providing most visitors with an experience that reinforces their view of the “exotic East” as a space of impenetrable, overwhelming spirituality. Still others will have seen in the overlapping meanings and experiences of the shrine a critique of the drive to break down the world into easily digestible pieces, to be labeled and absorbed into hegemonic frameworks of history, culture, religion, commerce, and aesthetics. Was the shrine a return to cabinets of curiosities and reconstructions of temples often used as display settings in nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions? Or did it help to break down walls of cultural difference for those unable to travel to the Himalayan region?

The specter of authenticity also haunted this exhibition. Viewers did not see the shrine as it appears in the collector’s home; this lessened the collector’s presence in the shrine. On the other hand, this Tibetan family shrine was not transplanted wholesale from a particular Tibetan family; instead, it was created through the process of collecting and disseminating objects through the diasporic movements of people and things. Thus, the shrine might have been seen to participate in the production of an abstracted, idealized national Tibetan family consolidated politically by diaspora groups and those sympathetic to their cause. Because of this participation in the production of Tibet, the shrine carried with it an ideology of salvage, of preservation and conservation of the “unique” culture of Tibet, a culture that both the catalogue and installation make clear is neither singular nor insulated from its regional neighbors or from international commerce.