Oil on canvas, 32 by 25 5/8 inches.ĭana was troubled by the dominance of European art in American museums and felt strongly that an American museum needed to support American artists. 7 The Good Shepherd by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), 1922. The newborn museum was housed in a large suite of galleries on the fourth floor of the library’s palatial Renaissance revival building on Washington Park in the heart of Newark’s industrial downtown.įig. Among the museum’s art-loving trustees were a varnish magnate (Franklin Murphy, who would also serve as New Jersey’s governor), a department store mogul (Louis Bamberger), and a gallery owner (Frederick Keer). When the Newark Museum was founded in 1909, its first director was John Cotton Dana (1856-1929), who was also the director of the city’s library system. It is twelve minutes from New York’s Penn Station. You will be impressed you will be surprised you will want to go there. Newark is still first in many ways as you will see. More than one hundred years later this radical agenda is now mainstream, but Newark was there first and with a kind of conviction that still goes much deeper than fashion. But this is Newark-not a destination for many out-of-town museumgoers (though it should be), so Ulysses Dietz has done the next best thing: he has introduced us in these pages to one of this country’s most important and original museums-describing it from its inception in 1909, when Charles Henry Dana boldly rearranged the hierarchies of art’s great chain of being, to its present moment as a model for institutional creativity and community involvement.ĭana’s adventure began by welcoming the arts of Asia and Africa, the arts of the everyday, folk art, and modernism. In a better world we would all be thronging the doors of the Newark Museum in the best of worlds Ulysses Grant Dietz would be there to meet us, taking us through the galleries with fellow curators Christa Clarke and Katherine Anne Paul. Major funding for this residency came from the National Endowment for the Arts.Ulysses Grant Dietz. Tibetan cultural expression remains severely restricted there, and the practice of sand mandala-making is one of the ways in which they counter that repression-making a statement, even in the diaspora, about cultural rights and community cohesion. Their homeland has been under Chinese occupation since the 1950s. Philadelphia is home to a vibrant Tibetan community, most members of which came to the U.S. He is the spiritual director of several Buddhist Centers in North America, with a home base currently in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Losang Samten is one of the mandala masters who created the first public sand mandala in the West in 1988. He also became a master of ritual dance and of sand mandalas, and was the Personal Attendant to His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama prior to moving to the United States in 1988. He earned the highest degree attainable at the monastery, equivalent to a doctoral degree in the West. Having escaped as a young child from his homeland of Tibet, in response to the Chinese occupation of the country, Losang lived and studied for over 20 years in the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India (the monastery of His Holiness the Dalai Lama). Losang Samten has been sharing teachings of loving-kindness, joy, and compassion, as well as the path to enlightenment, for almost 30 years. This was the first time that this particular mandala design will be created here in Philadelphia. One of the week-long residencies focused on the overcoming of obstacles through the creation of a Yamantaka Mandala, a cosmic blueprint of the celestial palace of the Tibetan Buddhist deity Yamantaka, who vanquishes death. On the last day of the residency, everyone was invited to participate in the dismantling ceremony, during which the sand is prepared for its return to nature. The public was invited to stop in to observe and ask questions as Losang created an intricate image of the Tibetan Buddhist universe out of colored sand.

50th Street in West Philadelphia during the last week of April. For ten years (2010–2019), the Philadelphia Folklore Project presented this annual residency with National Endowment for the Arts/National Heritage award winner Losang Samten at our gallery at 735 S.

Lama pictures folk art