By Marina Fatina
HOUSTON — Starting October 27, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) will showcase a new exhibition to explore how “humanity has given form to spiritual beliefs across time and cultures,” stated the museum.
The “Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples” exhibition features 200 objects created by humans over 3,000 years to make a connection with the divine.
British art historian and museum director Neil MacGregor broadcasted a 2017 BBC radio series and book of the same title. As a capstone for the MFAH’s 100th anniversary, museum director Gary Tinterow invited MacGregor to revisit his works and share his insight into the collection.
According to the news release, MacGregor said the exhibition put art in a spiritual context to “allow for a different conversation”.
“In museums, many great objects can lose their original purpose, which was spiritual. An exhibition of this kind can give that purpose back to them, allowing a new and deeper approach to great and familiar works,” said the British art historian.
The “Living with the Gods” collection includes historic and contemporary works from regions across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. While many featured works are from the MFAH collections to highlight their spiritual themes, there will be “unprecedented loans” from museums and institutions worldwide.
‘Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples’ will be on display from
October 27, 2024 to January 20, 2025 at the Caroline Wiess Law Building, 1001 Bissonnet Street, Houston, TX, 77005.
The collection’s galleries will explore “elemental themes: the cosmos, light, water, and fire; the mysteries of life and death; the divine word; and pilgrimage,” according to the news release.
Below are the descriptions of a few featured works released by the museum:
“Divine Water: Gangajali from the Maharaja’s City Palace, Jaipur (1894–96):” This large silver urn was one of three commissioned by the Roya
This one will leave India for only the second time for this exhibition. The urns appear in the gallery that addresses water and the divine, which includes a magnificent German medieval bronze baptismal font, William H. Johnson’s powerful circa-1940 painting I Baptize Thee and a photograph of a river baptism in Louisiana taken by Chandra McCormick in the mid-1980s.
“Holy Fire: Pentecost (c. 1600), by El Greco, from the Prado, Madrid:” This monumental altarpiece depicts the Christian holy day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit, in the form of flames, rested on the Virgin Mary and the Apostles in Jerusalem, 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The painting has rarely left the Prado since it was acquired in the late 19th century; it is shown in the “light and fire” gallery, in the context of, among other objects, a 20th-century silver Zoroastrian Afergan, or holy fire altar, on loan from a temple in Houston.
“The Cosmic Cycle: A Mid-20th-Century Bedu (“Moon”) Mask from the MFAH Collection:” Male-female pairs of Bedu masks are danced during harvest festivals and at funerals among the Nafana, Kulango and Degha communities of the Ivory Coast and Ghana to purify villages, protect them from sickness and danger, and encourage fertility. The piece will be presented in a gallery themed to the Cosmos, with a monumental Shiva Nataraj, on loan from a private collection. Shiva is the Hindu deity whose dance in a circle of fire embodies the eternal process of destruction and renewal.
For more information, please visit: https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/living-with-the-gods
MFAH members can attend the exhibition’s special events and drop-in tours, check out: https://www.mfah.org/exhibitions/living-with-the-gods/calendar?period=year
