Art Society's Excursion to Asian Art Museum

In their final excursion for the year, the Upper School’s Art Society visited the Asian Art Museum. For the “Divine Bodies” exhibit, junior Anjali B acted as docent as she had recently done research for Mr. Kovas's Eastern Religions class. The exhibit drew on largely Hindu and Buddhist sculpture and paintings...

...as well as contemporary photography, "organized into thematic sections that encourage us to look at objects not only as artworks but also as devotional images and ask, 'How can we see the human in the divine and the divine in the human?'" Anjali gave the group a detailed introduction to the Hindu concept of a third gender, a neither male nor female category occupied by people called the hijra. As Anjali told us, Indian society both shuns and reveres the hijra for containing, like many Hindu deities, both male and female cosmic powers.

Art Society, a purely voluntary group, made four visits this year to local exhibitions. We look forward to beginning the 2018-19 school year to the De Young Museum's exhibit, Weapons of Mass Seduction: The Art of Propaganda.

In the photo (l-r): teachers Kent Holubar and Cristina Shin, Joe P, Jenna S, Kaia B, Andy D, and Jack G. Others who joined, but aren’t pictured: Mr. Matt Waters, Mr. Bill Kwong, Mr. Boswell Kasuka, Mr. Peter Kovas, Ms. Kym Matossian and her daughters, and Mr. Durga Bobba, who was there to observe a special docent job provided by his daughter Anjali.

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