Elisabeth Coleman's Articles on Lions Roar

At New York’s Rubin Museum the spirit of the art is alive and cutting-edge. It’s both the world’s leading museum of Himalayan art and a hotspot of contemporary culture and thought. Elisabeth Coleman reports on this unique creative collision and the fascinating story behind it. One afternoon—it was about thirty years ago now—New Yorkers Shelley and Donald Rubin were walking up Madison Avenue and passed by one of the many fine art shops that call it home when their attention was drawn to a thangka, a traditional Tibetan painting, in the window. It portrayed White Tara, the female buddha of compassion. At the time they knew nothing about Himalayan art, but it stopped them in their tracks. “Our response was immediate and intuitive,” says Donald Rubin. “When you fall in love with someone, you don’t ask for their resumé and the history of their family. It’s the same thing with art. All you need to do is to feel it, to connect with it.” They bought the thangka and hung it in their bedroom. Gradually, they say, it started communicating with them. Inspired by this budding love affair, the Rubins began to learn about Himalayan art and collect it. “We let the art speak to us, and we paid attention to it. We built our collection by following our hearts,” Donald Rubin says. Gelek Rinpoche, a leading teacher of Tibetan Buddhism who practices and teaches about a number of female Buddhas, including Tara, says, “I’m not surprised it was White Tara who got his attention.” Chuckling, he adds, “Tara knows what she’s doing!” On October 2, 2004, that long love affair sparked by Tara came to fruition in a big way when the world’s premiere museum of Himalayan art—the Rubin Museum of Art, on West 17th Street in the fashionable Chelsea neighborhood of New York City—opened to the public. In a stunning example of architectural recycling, the new museum was housed in a former high-end clothing store, its beautiful steel-and-marble spiral staircase soaring upward from the lobby with galleries arranged, mandala-like, around it. The day of the opening, the street in front was packed with Himalayan musicians and dancers, politicians, high lamas, monks, and museum supporters. There was a parade of Himalayan dogs, and student artists made sidewalk art, intended, in the spirit of impermanence, to disappear with time. “Art liberates my soul,” says Donald Rubin. “It feeds me; it is intense. The energy from it takes over my life.” The Rubins believe art should be emotional and engaging, something people should get involved with. In typical fashion, then, the Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) asked one hundred contemporary artists to design for the opening their own versions of traditional Tibetan prayer flags, called dar cho in Tibetan. These flags, which have been a part of Himalayan culture for thousands of years, are said to spread good fortune to all beings—the fluttering motion of the cloth sets auspicious forces in motion and silences harmful ones. The flags were just one of many elements featured on that opening weekend. But in its effort to engage a wide variety of people, to make meaningful connections between Eastern and Western cultures, and in its sheer sense of fun and creativity, “Written on the Wind: The Flag Project” (which eventually appeared as a full-scale indoor exhibition in 2007-2008) exemplified the museum’s innovative approach to its art and public programs. When RMA opened its huge glass doors for the first time, strings of the colorful silk flags were pulled up from the street and fastened to the roof of the gracious, six-story building. The multicolored medley flapped softly in the warm autumn air, dispensing blessings to hundreds of cheering well-wishers. Today, the 70,000-square-foot museum houses about 3,000 works in its permanent collection, almost double the original 1,700, most of which were donated by Shelley and Donald Rubin from their personal collection. The museum draws from all the cultures that touch the 1,800-mile arc of mountains that stretches from Afghanistan to Burma, including the Tibet Autonomous Region, Nepal, Mongolia, and Bhutan. The larger Himalayan cultural sphere, based on thousands of years of cultural exchanges, also includes Iran, India, China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. At the same time, the museum has developed a reputation as a hotbed of innovative, contemporary programming, attracting talent like director Martin Scorsese, actor/playwrights Sam Shepherd and Wally Shawn, and musicians Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, and Moby. RMA’s permanent collection includes many prized pieces, among them: “Durga,” a stunning 11” x 13” x 7 ¼” gilt copper-alloy statue, Nepalese, seventeenth century, and “Pagmodrupa Dorje Gyalpo, Tibetan Teacher,” a Tibetan thangka from the thirteenth century made of mineral pigments on cloth. In its short history, RMA has produced thirty-two highly praised exhibits, many of them startlingly ambitious, that delve into aspects of Himalayan art and culture that have rarely, if ever, been addressed in a museum setting. These include: exhibitions on celebrated flying Himalayan mystics, Sikh art and beliefs, female buddhas, and the colorful, magical Buddhist adepts known as siddhas. Currently on display is a highly rated group of artworks from Bhutan, showing through January, 2009, and next year will bring the first of eight annual exhibits, each dealing with a little-known area of Tibetan painting. An exhibition on the Jain religion, rarely heard of in the West, is under development. Several projects launched earlier with the Rubins’ support are housed down the street from the museum and complement its work. Himalayan Art Resources, which is managed by scholar and former Buddhist monk Jeff Watt, maintains an ever-growing Web site of astonishing scope. The site, himalyanart.org, has pulled together images from almost eighty different sources, including private collections, photographic archives, published works, and nearly forty museums in North America, Europe, and Asia. The Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center—down the hall from Himalayan Art Resources—scans, formats, and distributes scans of 12,000 texts with the goal of creating a digital library. This Web-based resource also provides all of the biographical references for the many identifiable portrait paintings and sculpture in the Himalayan Art Project database. The TBRC is directed by Gene Smith, a famed Tibetan scholar who has devoted more than four decades to collecting and reprinting Tibetan texts held in the exile community and other Tibetan-speaking communities. Smith, an éminence grise and living treasure in the world of Tibetan texts, is impressed by what the Rubins have accomplished. Tibetan Buddhism, Smith says, is “the most mystical, esoteric form of Buddhism. Shelley and Donald are not Buddhists, and their commitment to create a public institution around the art is quite amazing. That kind of magnanimity is pretty rare.” “The Rubin Museum of Art is a wonderful contribution to New York cultural life,” says Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim Museum. “They have managed, through imaginative programming, to engage contemporary-art audiences with highly arcane topics of tantric religious art. This is an educational feat, and I admire it.” Donald Rubin is 73, a tall and imposing man with deep, somewhat sad eyes. His first life, as a hard-nosed and savvy businessman, shows through in his second life as an art connoisseur and patron. He is a person of strong emotion, and relies on his intuition, on what he calls a “heart connection,” for guidance. He is deeply loyal to those he embraces, yet he can also be very tough. Lisa Schubert, former director of external affairs at RMA, says that everything at RMA has grown out of Donald and Shelley Rubin’s “original vision to make the experience of the art relevant to people of all ages, religions, and backgrounds.” The Rubins see art as a powerful vehicle for understanding humanity, and for change. “By learning about other cultures,” says Donald Rubin, “we also learn about our own culture, something we know very little about, unfortunately.” The Rubins believe art should be available to everyone, but with this kind of subject matter, some interpretation is required. The entire second floor of the museum is devoted to explaining what Himalayan art is, how it is made, and what its purpose is. Tour guides tell stories rather than just laying out the facts. Special programs have been created for underserved audiences: there are special gallery tours for the partially sighted and the hearing-impaired; Mandarin and Spanish language tours are available. Educational programs have been designed for all age groups, including a half-dozen classes for the very young. The popular body-movement class, “Moving through Art,” integrates, say, facial expressions or hand positions from the art into movement. For three years, the Rubin has produced “Peak Experience,” the ultimate sleepover for children aged ten to twelve. Forty boys and girls are roped together to scale the world’s most extreme terrain (which in reality is the museum’s stunning spiral staircase, covered with mounds of cotton wool snow and wrapped with a light, blowy fabric). They sleep “on the mountain,” amid loud howling winds, then set off for the summit in the pre-dawn darkness. There are also programs for teenagers and adults, but it’s the Rubin’s work with seniors, giving them free admission one day a month, that has gained special praise. In February, the City of New York selected the museum to announce its “SM(ART)S—Seniors Meet the Arts” program. “The Rubin Museum has demonstrated a strong commitment to access initiatives for all audiences, especially seniors,” says Kate D. Levin, commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City. “Donald is fascinating and perplexing, one of the most complicated people I have ever tried to figure out,” says Karen Kedmey, former manager of media relations at RMA...

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