Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Christian Folk Art from India


Here's a recent exhibition that I wish I could've seen-- "Christian Folk Art from India" at Augusta Savage Gallery at UMass from December 12 - 16, 2011, where
each piece in the collection is a painted cloth scroll depicting a Christian story or concept... the scrolls were used by Chitrakars, traveling painters/storytellers in the Bengal province of India, and the scrolls were used to help illustrate the stories that the Chitrakars shared with communities. 
In the 20th century, they occasionally used their traditional motifs and techniques to portray Christian subjects.  Also included in the show are works by Christian Indian artist Frank Wesley, as well as other Christian artworks and artifacts such as brass crucifixes, clay creches, posters, and other objects.

The works in the collection are owned by Georgana Falb Foster, 83, an independent scholar of South Asian studies and member of the American Council of Southern Asian Art.  In the 1990s, she gave the collection to the Museum of Art at the University of Iowa as a research collection.  She has given papers at the Conference of South Indian Religion and the Wisconsin South Asian conference and is a co-author of a chapter on the pilgrimage to the popular goddess Vaishno Devi in Jammu in "Sacred Geography of Goddesses in South Asia" Scholarly Books (2010).

3 comments:

  1. Thats Krishna's crucifiction, a tale dating back hundreds of years before Jesus.

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  2. Some debate if Krishna died since he was God, but the tale goes : "According to the Mahabharata, a fight breaks out at a festival among the Yadavas, who end up killing each other. Mistaking the sleeping Krishna for a deer, a hunter named Jara shoots an arrow that fatally injures him. Krishna forgives Jara and dies." Crucifixion was a Roman way of killing that was humiliating and excruciatingly painful. Jesus died for the sins of the world.

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  3. Krishna was not crucified. Crucifixion was a Roman mode of killing. Jesus died for the sins of the world after being betrayed and handed over to the Roman government that only killed him because the Jewish leaders insisted upon it. Krishna died by accident, though some Hindu scholars believe he did not actually die because he was divine. "According to the Mahabharata, a fight breaks out at a festival among the Yadavas, who end up killing each other. Mistaking the sleeping Krishna for a deer, a hunter named Jara shoots an arrow that fatally injures him. Krishna forgives Jara and dies."

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