Beyond Boundaries: Buddhist Art of Gandhara at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Beyond Boundaries
Buddhist Art of Gandhara
April 30, 2021 — March 13, 2022
The Gandharan region of northern India served as a crossroads of power, culture, and Buddhist art from the second to ninth centuries CE. Presenting rare images of the Buddha and his life story, this exhibition demonstrates through thirty-six sculptural examples from public and private collections the important cultural exchanges between the Hellenistic world of Greek and Roman art and the native artistic traditions of India. Artisans of this region took a new, humanistic approach to depicting the Buddha in clothing and settings drawn from the West and combined them with descriptive tales of the life and teachings of the Buddha. This is the first substantial exhibition focusing on Gandharan Buddhist art in an American museum in ten years and, as such, brings new scholarship and understanding to the field.
Beyond Boundaries: Buddhist Art of Gandhara is organized by Osmund Bopearachchi, adjunct professor of Central and South Asian Art, Archaeology, and Numismatics in the Group in Buddhist Studies UC Berkeley, and Julia M. White, senior curator for Asian art, with Lucia Olubunmi Momoh, curatorial assistant. The exhibition is supported in part by the Asian Art Endowment Fund.
Click the image below to watch the virtual tour of Beyond Boundaries: Buddhist Art of Gandhara.
