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In October, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will present Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples, an expansive exhibition of more than 200 objects made over 3,000 years in order to help humans make contact with the divine. For the exhibition, MFAH Director Gary Tinterow has invited British art historian and longtime museum director Neil MacGregor to revisit his 2017 BBC radio series and book of the same title, bringing that vision to great objects in the MFAH’s collections as well as landmark loans from international institutions.
Buddha Enthroned, Thailand (Khmer), Angkor period, c. 1180–1220, bronze, Kimbell Art Museum
Living with the Gods will present works from the MFAH collections to emphasize their original, spiritual intent. The exhibition will feature unprecedented loans from the Prado, Madrid, and the collections of the City Palace, royal residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur, and significant loans from other institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Menil Collection, Houston; National Gallery of Ireland; and the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City. The Ministry of Culture, Greece, supported important loans from the Benaki Museum, Athens, as well as the Church of Agios Matthias Sinaites, Heraklion, a dependency of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.
Dialogue
Displayed in dialogue across a suite of eleven galleries, masterpieces in the installation will explore elemental themes, among them: the cosmos, light, water, fire; the mysteries of life and death; the divine word; and pilgrimage. Living with the Gods will draw from regions across ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe and the Americas and will include both historic and contemporary works.
Commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, “For millennia, people have been making art to communicate with their God or gods and to sustain their communities. Neil MacGregor’s acclaimed 2017 BBC radio series and book brilliantly chronicled this enduring form of human expression. We are honored that he brought that perspective to Houston, making it visible through objects chosen from our own collections as well as some truly exceptional loans. This exhibition is a truly magnificent capstone to our first century as a museum.”
Shiva Nataraja, India, late 19th– early 20th centuries, metal, private collection
“This exhibition is about how people everywhere have made beautiful things to negotiate their place in time and in the world; and how we use works of art to think about how we relate to each other,” said Neil MacGregor. “Putting art into that context allows 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.”
The installation will unfold across ten thematic sections, each composed of objects from the MFAH collections and anchored by significant loans. The show will explore how global cultures across millennia have found the divine in the physical world and its phenomena – the cosmos, time, light, darkness, fire, water, animals –and how they created objects to reflect that spiritual view of the world around them.
Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples / October 27, 2024–January 20, 2025
See also: Living Paintings in the Maldives
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