Asia Dominates New Season of Art Shows

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter

A room from a private home in Damascus, 18th century.
Collection of Metropolitan Museum of Art.

NEW YORK - THE big institutional news in New York City this fall is the reopening, after eight years of renovation and rethinking, of the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic collection, in what are now being called the Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia. The wrap-around suite of 15 spaces, which opens on Nov. 1, will hold some 1,200 works (out of a collection of 12,000) from dozens of cultures that have, during 13 centuries, shared Islam as a religious faith.  Elsewhere, in shows of modern and contemporary art, names are right out front: ).[link]

• Asia Society Museum in New York City has paintings and drawings by the famed Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore through Dec. 31.
• Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco has several young Indian artists will be appearing in a show called “The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India,” opening Oct. 15.
• Cleveland Museum of Art presents “Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965)” beginning Oct. 16, one of that country’s pioneer modernists takes a turn in the spotlight.
• Denver Art Museum features another of that country's pioneer modernists, Xu Beihong (1895-1953) starting Oct. 15.
• Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution in Washington opens“Power/Play: China’s Empress Dowager” on Sept. 24.
• Asian Art Museum in San Francisco has two big Imperial-style exhibitions for the 2011-12 season with “Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts” unfurling on Oct. 21 and
• Metropolitan Museum of Art host another Imperiral-style exhibition,“Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition (7th-9th century)” in March.
• The Met also hosts artworks from “The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China: Masterpieces of Ming Loyalist Art from the Chih Lo Lou Collection,” through Jan. 2.
• Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis presents “Reflections of the Buddha” at through March 10.

(Source: The New York Times)