If American museums have been the one supply of details about Tibetan Buddhist shrines, one would come away with the impression that shrines are elaborate, pristine environments layered with thangka work and silken finery amidst rows of statuary and ritual objects organized atop fantastically crafted wood furnishings. Enveloped by recordings of soppy Buddhist chanting and illuminated by flickering LED butter lamps, the shrine rooms of the previous Rubin Museum of Himalayan Artwork in New York and the Smithsonian’s Nationwide Museum of Asian Artwork in Washington, DC droop guests in a luxurious, fastidiously curated surroundings. To this finish, curators have deliberately omitted labels or didactics, ostensibly to protect the viewer’s contemplative expertise. Touted as “magnificent” and seen as a “refuge in uncertain times,” these immersive areas have lengthy captivated the general public and media alike. However what if these beloved areas, attracting hundreds of tourists every year, are simply websites of appropriation — of each tangible and intangible cultural heritage? In gentle of the Brooklyn Museum of Artwork’s current opening of its six-year mortgage of the Rubin Museum’s Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, I believe the query is price reexamining.
The sensory-immersive “Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Rooms” well-liked in American museums since 2010 differ markedly from their predecessors of the Nineteen Thirties and ’40s, when establishments such because the Newark Museum of Artwork in New Jersey and the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Artwork in Staten Island displayed modest altars that includes Tibetan Buddhist devotional objects. Collector Alice Kandell first promoted the immersive shrine expertise when she gifted a group of over 220 Tibetan Buddhist objects to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian. In a 2013 essay in Artwork of Advantage, Kandell writes about this reward and her accumulating practices, claiming that she “wanted the shrine to be as authentic as it would have been in Tibet.” A citation from Smithsonian curator Debra Diamond notes the restrictions that got here with Kandell’s reward, such because the “long-term display of the objects within a liturgically appropriate and distinctly separate shrine room gallery” (emphasis added), which the Smithsonian obliged. In 2010, the Rubin Museum of Artwork (RMA) accepted a mortgage of Kandell’s “shrine”; in 2013, it created its personal model and saved it on view till 2024. Kandell shrines have additionally been displayed on the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory College (2016) and gifted to the Minneapolis Institute of Artwork.
The Rubin Museum of Artwork’s “Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room” in February 2025
The Rubin Museum of Artwork’s “Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room” in February 2025
In these aforementioned shows, the “shrines” are equally constructed, with a shared palette of darkish blues and reds accented with yellow and gold. Thangkas (work) usually cling on the central wall, and gilt metallic statuary is positioned alongside a pyramid-like group spilling down from the intricately carved cabinetry. All examples have embroidered banners, and a few have a silk baldaquin that hangs over the central space of the shrine, usually with sculptures of a wheel and two deer. By regurgitating what is basically the identical shrine, nevertheless, museums are each negating the limitless variations of precise shrines and peddling a Western aesthetic of a “traditional” or “authentic” Tibetan shrine that’s with none scholarly or historic backing.
For instance, in January 2025, SmartHistory launched an episode misleadingly titled “Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room,” which in reality solely paperwork the RMA’s set up. As Elena Pakhoutova, curator of the RMA’s “shrine room” explains, the show is a “curated installation that presented the objects how they may have been displayed and used in a traditional Tibetan Buddhist household.” Museum installations lean problematically on the language of “tradition” and “authenticity” with out scholarly backing for these claims. One is left asking: What time intervals and areas inform these museum constructions? Because it stands, the installations are largely ahistorical, other than the truth that the person objects themselves are properly dated and researched. That is exactly the issue: Such curated constructions perform extra as a car for displaying a group than as documentation of precise shrines. With out data of the lived ritual practices and historic moments that give rise to shrine environs, and with out historic, ethnographic, or archival proof to floor claims, these museum reconstructions largely stay unfounded fabrications.
Tibetan Buddhist shrine room in Queens, New York
Element of Shakyamuni Buddha thangka commissioned in anticipation of a member of the family’s dying ritual (2024)
From fieldwork in Tibet, the western Himalaya, and diasporic communities in Queens, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I’ve seen {that a} dwelling shrine’s constellation of objects is created over generations by way of an array of practices associated, however not restricted, to liturgical want, ritual apply, and gift-giving exchanges. A functioning shrine displays a community of reciprocity, reifying relationships and connections throughout house and time. One shrine in Philadelphia, owned by a Tibetan gentleman in his 70s, holds household heirlooms his mother and father carried out of Tibet in 1959. They introduced a butter lamp and a metallic sculpture of Akshobya with them on the journey to India, and finally to america. For the steward, this shrine and his objects are deeply significant. As he mentioned throughout an interview with me in 2024, “Altars, you know, they bring memory and love.” In Queens, one other dwelling shrine belongs to a Tibetan couple now of their late 60s. Since they moved to the US in 2008, they’ve constantly constructed their shrine piece by piece. They confirmed me their current acquisitions of a sculpture and thangka, that are supposed for his or her eventual dying rituals. Certainly, shrines have the potential to attach powerfully to a household’s historical past and ancestors, and their creation and upkeep are tied to a deep sense of cosmological order.
Objects inside typical shrines embody a spread of materiality: sculptures, work, images, ritual objects, and manuscripts, in addition to gadgets that may not be thought of “art” by Western requirements however maintain deep energy inside Tibetan Buddhist contexts — treasured drugs, soil from pilgrimage websites, posters and plastic statuary, and blessed barley seeds, amongst others. As one steward of a centuries-old dwelling shrine in Ladakh, India defined to me in an interview in 2005, having these objects shouldn’t be what’s essential. Moderately, as I wrote in Clever Beneficence: Alternatives from the David R. Nalin Himalayan Artwork Assortment (2019), “It is the religious commitment to the images that is most important in order to keep them alive and functioning and to gain merit.” At their most simple, shrines are saved alive by way of prayer, prostration, puja, and by choices of water, incense, and lightweight. You will need to bear in mind, nevertheless, that past these seen traces, invisible threads of tales and recollections join a shrine’s objects to communal historical past, sacred geography, and ritual apply. Even from half a world away, these objects and practices allow diasporic communities to take care of a residing connection to their cultural traditions throughout generations.
Ladakhi household Buddhist shrine throughout Guru Rinpoche puja, a Buddhist ritual (2024)
Museum reconstructions of shrine rooms can usually cut back and flatten the dynamic, various realities of residing Tibetan Buddhist shrines. Some readers may object that my critique is unfair — that I’m measuring premodern-inspired museum shows towards the vibrancy of latest shrines. However let’s be clear: The museum shrine room itself is a recent fabrication, constructed on ahistorical assumptions about what a “traditional” family shrine might need appeared like. And it really works. As Diamond observes within the aforementioned essay, greater than 300,000 individuals visited their shrine in fewer than 4 months, and the RMA claims that their shrine room was its hottest exhibition, “experienced by more than one million visitors from the year it opened.”
Of their drive to draw crowds, museums deal with creating theater-like experiences that underinform the general public and additional reveal way more concerning the Western fantasy of “elaborate private household shrines” than concerning the shrines themselves. What occurs, then, when audiences search greater than fiction and fetish? I urge establishments just like the Brooklyn Museum to interrogate and critically rethink outdated “shrine rooms” and their outdated curatorial underpinnings. In doing so, museums may rework these installations from static backdrops into websites of dialogue, moral reflection, and cultural recognition.
A house shrine in Philadelphia (2024)
Market in Queens, New York promoting supplies wanted for upkeep of functioning shrines (2024)
View from a household shrine (2024)
