The Naxi of Ancestral China at Rubin Museum of Art, Thanks to a Roosevelt

NEW YORK OBSERVER
By Maika Pollack

Ritual Card; Northwestern Yunnan Province, China

NEW YORK - Chances are you haven’t heard of the Naxi (pronounced NAH-shee), a group of 300,000 people living on the east end of the Himalayas at the boarder of Sichuan, Tibet and Burma. Their religion is a hybrid resulting from this crossroads: Dongba blends Buddhism, Tibetan Bon, Taoism, Confucianism, Mongolian shamanism and local cults. At age 19 Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, wrote what remains the sole academic dissertation on Naxi art in Western scholarship. He went on to amass the most significant group of Naxi artifacts outside of China. His holdings, mainly those acquired on a 1939 trip through China’s Northwest Yunnan Province, make up this first-ever exhibition of the material. [link]