Making a renewable frame drum as part of Asia After Dark.

Instrument maker John Tewksbury showed participants how to make and personalize a renewable-frame drum. All it takes is wood, plastic wrap, paint and decorations, and your own imagination!

A drummer with heart.

DJ Spooky and musicians Danielle Cho and Jennifer Kim

Asia After Dark: Asian Soundscape begins in about an hour and includes a live performance by acclaimed digital media artist and musician DJ Spooky and instrumentalists Danielle Cho and Jennifer Kim. Also on the program, instrument-maker John Tewksbury and cross-cultural percussionist Steve Bloom, follow by curator-led exhibition tours. Listen. Watch. Create….then dance!

Chelsea Shops, James McNeill Whistler, 1880s, F1902.149a-b.

This Sunday, take an imaginative stroll through London’s Chelsea neighborhood and learn about the history of DC’s waterfront. Join Maya Foo, curator of Whistler’s Neighborhood: Impressions of a Changing London, and Lee Glazer, associate curator of American art, at 1 pm in the Freer for a tour of the exhibition followed by a 1.5-mile walking tour of the Southwest Waterfront. The free tour will be conducted by Cultural Tourism DC, rain or shine. Register now!

The tour will shed light on the parallels between the Southwest Waterfront, a neighborhood currently in transition, and nineteenth-century Chelsea, a mixed-income area that was affected by the Thames Embankment project. Both neighborhoods are situated along riverfront property, making the land attractive for real estate development.

The Chelsea Embankment, which was part of the larger Thames Embankment project, was a major public engineering feat that resulted in improving river navigation and the city’s sewage system. It also changed the topography of the waterfront by reclaiming acreage from the river where public gardens and pedestrian walkways were later established. Redevelopment also occurred with the demolition of historic buildings, which created space for expensive mansion blocks—apartments that were intended for the upper classes. The poor were displaced and many were forced to live above storefronts in small, cramped apartments with other families.

Old-clothes Shop, No. 2, James McNeill Whistler, etching on paper, F1903.163.

The diminutive works in the exhibition are coded with social issues, including childhood poverty and overcrowding. Whistler, however, did not intend for these works to promote social change. The etchings were not mass produced and were not meant for a wide audience. While documenting the poorer sections of Chelsea, the artist was attracted to the geometric forms created by architectural elements, such as window panes and doorways.

Register now to join us on Sunday!

DJ Spooky, Novara Jazz Festival 2007; credit: Giancarlo Minelli

In anticipation of Asia After Dark: Asian Soundscape, Bento caught up with acclaimed digital media artist and musician Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky. He will perform at F|S on Friday evening, playing music set against 1940s black-and-white films featuring Asian American pioneer actress Anna May Wong.

Bento: As the first DJ in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, can you tell me what it’s like to score for a museum, a place that’s known primarily for visual arts?

DJSpooky: Everybody likes to think of museums as places of “permanence”—but it couldn’t be further from reality. Shows change all the time; collections come and go. I like to think the performance I’m doing at the Sackler is essentially about the constantly changing landscape of digital media. It’s also a musical homage to how people perceived one of the principal figures of the beginning of the last century. It’s always cool to play with history. Anna May Wong is super cool!

B: As an artist and musician, what inspires your creativity?

DJS: Fun! Everything serious should be seriously fun!

B: Can you tell us a little bit about your upcoming performance here and why you chose to rescore the Lady from Chungking, starring Anna May Wong?

DJS: If you’ve seen Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, if you’ve seen Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, you get the vibe—mysterious, Oriental exotic; yeah! Gangnam style, from the 1920s! That’s why I thought Lady from Chungking would be a cool film to present as a dance party film. Mystery + history … keep it movin’!

Anna May Wong, photographed by Carl Van Vechten; via Wikimedia Commons

B: When did you first become interested in Asian cinema?

DJS: Everybody from Wu-Tang Clan on over to Hendrix’s incredible album covers based on Indian mythology, to even more pop-influenced material like David Bowie’s China Girl: That’s all stuff in my record collection. When I was growing up listening to mix tapes, everyone put clips from Chinese and Japanese films on their mixes. It just made everything sound cool. The dynamics of Kurosawa, the intensity of Bruce Lee, the surrealness of Beat Takeshi, and of course, the wildness of Takashi Miike … plus Lucy Liu … that’s the vibe. I guess I was like an American kid of the last 40 years, immersed in the subtle influences of both pop cinema and arthouse material.

B: As a native Washingtonian, was the Smithsonian an important part of your childhood?

DJS: The Smithsonian museum system was always a portal into a different world, where you could easily drift into the way that they reflected so much history, and so much of the way the world’s complexity is part of the American experience. As a kid, I could imagine them as worlds unto themselves. You could get lost and wander in them for hours, if not entire days. That was the beauty of growing up in DC—you had the entire world at your figertips. It’s experiences like going to Antarctica to write a string ensemble work that made me realize how much the museums of DC gave me the ability to think of the immense horizons DC kids have access to. It’s a great situation.

B: Can you tell us what’s next for DJ Spooky?

DJS: After I do my show at the Sackler, I have concerts in Korea and China mid-October. I’m also finishing my next book with MIT, about apps. It’s called The Imaginary App.

Get your Asia After Dark tickets here.

Alec in the shadows; photo by Perry A. Tourtellotte

Claudia Chang, professor of archaeology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, is director of an international field research project on the archaeology of the Iron Age in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Throughout the exhibition Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, on view in the Sackler until November 12, 2012, Claudia will share tales from her ongoing fieldwork with us on Bento.

All week the weather reports have predicted rain, but we have mostly had glowering skies, occasional winds, and some thunder grumblings. Today we quit before our break time because a rain came, but it was short-lasting. Steppe weather usually comes from the northwest, where the storm clouds gather and then blow against the high Tianshan Mountains.

The crew was happy to leave early today. It’s been a long dig season. Most archaeological projects in Kazakhstan are located in remote mountain, desert, or steppe areas where a field camp is set up, and the project lasts for 3 to 6 weeks. We’re now into the 9th week of excavation.

I refer to what we do as “garage archaeology.” We pick the crew up every day at 6:30 am with the Uhas Microautobus, drive less than 3 km (1.9 miles) to the site with our equipment, and then work until 12:15 pm. It is a short day, but usually packed with so many activities that even the high school students who work with us sometimes comment on how fast the morning hours pass. Then we drive from the site to the place where we store the artifacts and park the bus in the garage.

After weeks of hard decisions, such as over which pieces of fallen mud brick wall to destroy and which to keep because they could be parts of walls, tandoor ovens, or floors, we have now found two large rooms in front of the upper mud brick platform and a large storage pit to the west of the platform. There are successive layers of packed mud brick flooring. A week ago, we broke out the three archaeological picks we brought from the US. They are the preferred tools for smashing the mud brick and adobe fall.

Olzhas asked yesterday, “When are we going to find gold?” The fact is that in settlement sites such as Tuzusai there is no gold to be found. Today we found a tiny piece of bronze, about the closest we’ll come to any kind of precious metal. It is indeed difficult for us to believe that the kurgans, with such rich burial inventories as the Issyk Golden Warrior, actually come from the same Iron Age period as a settlement site such as Tuzusai.

Bronze bracelet; photo by Perry A. Tourtellotte

But today we did find an elite artifact on the second floor of the mud brick platform: half of a bronze bracelet. That’s an amazing find, probably the most incredible find we’ve had. When Alec found it, he turned to show it to me. Later I said, “Years from now you’ll be able to go to the Kazakh State Central Museum in Almaty and point to the bronze bracelet on display and say, ‘I found that in 2012!’”

Using a parachute to keep cool.

Claudia Chang, professor of archaeology at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, is director of an international field research project on the archaeology of the Iron Age in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Throughout the exhibition Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan, on view in the Sackler until November 12, 2012, Claudia will share tales from her ongoing fieldwork with us on Bento.

The weather has turned hot and has baked out a lot of the archaeological contexts. The dust from 2000-year-old crumbling mud brick gets on our clothes and covers all the finds on the site. This week I wrote an email to our ceramic specialist and asked her how we could remove the thick white carbonate found on many of our sherds, obscuring the painted designs and slip. She says that soaking the pottery pieces in a vinegar solution will help remove the carbonate layer. I also asked her if she knew how to reconstruct some of the broken pots we have found. She asked me if I just wanted to piece together the pots so we could get a count of the number of whole vessels or if I thought the pots should be restored as art objects.

This is an important question. Many of the objects on display in the exhibition Nomads and Networks have been curated and preserved as ‘art objects.’ Most were probably found in excellent condition when removed from the soil, but others might have required careful restoration and preservation techniques. Excavated artifacts have a life of their own. They are from the same time period and cultural origins as the settlement site of Tuzusai, yet our ceramic inventory is much more variable. We have large storage vessels with splashes of red paint, cooking vessels, bowls, jars, cups and plates. There are ceramic disks with a perforated center hole used as spindle whorls and large broken pot pieces with repair holes. Obviously household artifacts can be quite different from those found in burials. Burial inventories, unless robbed or disturbed, are often sealed contexts containing whole pots, sacrificial animals, daggers, finely fashioned plaques of gold that were sewn onto material. A settlement site, or a place where people actually lived, is filled with the debris and trash that is left behind when the settlement was abandoned.

The life of an artifact, like the beautiful double ribbed ceramic kettle found on the surface of the mud brick platform is amazing. Three weeks ago we found a large double ribbed kettle on the mud brick platform. We have been debating whether or not the deeper levels below the platform were the living surfaces associated with the house. Two days ago Lyuba carefully dug around a rim sherd of the same double ribbed kettle that had fallen 40 cm below the platform. We often find little treasures in the cracks and crevasses of architectural features. This week someone found two tiny fragments of bronze in a post hole. Think about a tiny piece of jewelry or a penny that falls through the floor boards of an old house. Household archaeology is made up of the debris and the small ‘forgotten things’ of everyday life. The archaeologist who finds a tiny fragment of bronze in a post hole or a broken pot on a floor of a house, or in the associated trash on a living floor, is ever curious about the history of such objects.

The artifacts associated with elite burials of the nomadic aristocrats, such as the sacrificial horses with their leather masks and antler horns found in Tomb 13 at Berel in the Altai, or the Golden Warrior with his plaques of gold sewn on his kaftan, leggings, and tall hat, you might also consider the everyday objects found at a Tuzusai. These artifacts include broken pots, remains of past meals such as animal bones and charred seeds, and even a favorite stone polished with a hole drilled into it, worn as a pendant or used as a sharpening stone.

As the days get hotter we have found a way to use a parachute as a shade. In this photo note the contrast between our parachute used as shade and the ancient mud brick architecture at Tuzusai.

Book cover from a volume of the Gulshan Album, painted with colors and gold and lacquered, India, F1999.2a-b

Najiba H. Choudhury interned in the curatorial department and assisted with Worlds within Worlds; she now works in the registrar’s office but continues to do research for Yoga: The Art of Transformation, opening in 2013. Mekala Krishnan is a curatorial researcher working on the yoga exhibition.

Mekala Krishnan: Tell us about your work at F|S. Maybe describe your typical day in the curatorial department.

Najiba Choudhury: I don’t think there is a typical day for a curatorial intern. There were weeks when I was doing only pure research. You know: scouring for material, poring over books, and writing reports on objects for an upcoming exhibition. Then there is the usual scanning, xeroxing, editing images, and putting together PowerPoint presentations. I was also able to assist my supervisor, curator Debra Diamond, on the Worlds within Worlds exhibition. For a while I was just reading multiple rounds of the label texts for the exhibition, proofreading, and fact-checking. The nature of the work varies wildly, depending on the needs of the department at that moment. You also get to attend talks, events, and storage visits at the Freer and Sackler.

MK: Are there aspects of curatorial work that you hadn’t expected coming in?

NC: The public aspect of a curator’s job surprised me. I hadn’t realized that a BIG part of being a curator is interacting with people. This includes not only communicating with multiple departments within the museums but also with the public. You have to keep in touch with scholars in your field and museum professionals from the other institutions, cultivate relationships with donors and friends of the museums, and talk to the press. Then, obviously, curators have to give exhibition tours and other talks for the general public. It’s a lot!

MK: What was your favorite part of working on Worlds within Worlds?

NC: First of all, it was an amazing learning experience to observe the whole process of putting together an exhibition; so many different departments are involved in the process. It truly is a team effort. But I have to say, the most exciting part for me was going into storage and the conservation labs and just looking at the objects really closely, and listening to the curators and various experts talk about the pieces, discussing their details. It’s almost like going to a jam session. I mean, there have been so many moments when we discovered something new just by looking at art objects together, discussing our thoughts, and hashing out ideas.

MK: Tell us more about the process of putting together an exhibition. How are the paintings chosen?

NC: Worlds within Worlds presented an unique situation in that the exhibition is in honor of the revised and expanded edition of Milo Cleveland Beach’s book The Imperial Image, which presents the Mughal collection of the Freer and Sackler Galleries. So in some ways, we already had the source material in hand. But the exhibition curators, Debra Diamond and Massumeh Farhad, wanted to add another layer, highlighting the historical and stylistic connections between Persian and Mughal painting traditions. While selecting paintings for the three galleries, we not only tried to pick our strongest works, but also examples that demonstrate the distinct sensibilities of the three Mughal emperors (Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan), show certain shifts in style and subject based on the emperors’ demands and desires, and demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of the Mughal courts between the 16th and 17th centuries. I think it’s quite clever the way each painting serves multiple purposes/narratives at the same time.

The literal answer to your question is: One day I came into Debra’s office and the whole floor was covered with printouts of images. She was pairing paintings together and trying to curve out narratives from them, in an attempt to plan a gallery wall. Later on, there were multiple rounds of editing, where Debra and Massumeh would sit together discuss the layout, often removing paintings from the object list and adding new ones.

MK: What can we learn about the Mughal empire from Worlds within Worlds? What new “worlds” did you discover?

NC: The Mughals were highly cosmopolitan. They were very much in touch with the Islamic world (both Persian and Ottoman empires) and also in contact with Europeans through official dignitaries and Jesuit missionaries who visited the Indian subcontinent. The Mughals were distinctly aware of local traditions in India, and were in constant dialogue with Hindus, Jains, and Muslims. This cross-cultural interaction and diversity is directly reflected in the paintings that were commissioned by the Mughal emperors, as seen in Worlds within Worlds.

As to discovering new worlds: Even since the exhibition went up, I’m discovering new things every day. Just the other day, I was touring the exhibition with two of my coworkers from the Islamic Department and one of them pointed out the face of a woman poking out of a window in the Noah’s Ark painting. You only see a tiny face, but there is no doubt that it’s a woman. It’s totally cool! I find that it’s moments like these that make working in a Mughal exhibition truly special. The paintings are filled with intricate details; they were meant to be held closely, like a book, and carefully studied. Hence, you are constantly finding new elements.

MK: You were involved with creating the website for the exhibition. Tell us about what you did.

NC: I was involved from the initial stages of creating the online component of Worlds within Worlds. I selected the Mughal paintings on which you can zoom in and click on specific parts for more details. I also helped shape content, which included writing some of the zoomify details, among other things.

MK: What is your favorite zoomify detail and why?

NC: I love the Gulshan album cover details. They are difficult to see even with magnifying glasses, but now people can visit the website to view them with very high degrees of magnification. I love the scene showing a group of Europeans dressed in their fineries, enjoying fine food and music. It’s very much about indulging your senses. And then to its left, there’s another detail showing two ascetics (yogis) scantily dressed who have renounced all forms of pleasure. The way it juxtaposes opposites, indulging your senses and austerity, all in the same page is really interesting to me.

There is another detail from the album cover where you have an adorable cheetah sitting on a horse, next to a royal hunter. I didn’t know before working on this project that a) you can tame a cheetah and b) on hunts the Mughals would take domesticated cheetahs as part of their royal entourage. Every time I see the cheetah, just casually sitting there, it cracks me up!

Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran closes on Sunday, September 16, 2012.

“Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings” from the St. Petersburg Album,1615-18, Bichitr;
opaque watercolor, gold and ink on paper; Purchase F1942.15a

Najiba H. Choudhury interned in the curatorial department and assisted with Worlds within Worlds; she now works in the registrar’s office but continues to do research for Yoga: The Art of Transformation, opening in 2013.

While walking through the exhibition Worlds within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran, giving occasional unofficial tours to friends, I have been caught unaware by wandering visitors who ask me, “What’s the highlight of this show?” or “What’s your favorite painting?”

Time and again, I point to the series of allegorical paintings commissioned by the Mughal emperor Jahangir as one of the highlights. Only four such allegorical portraits were commissioned by Jahangir; the Freer|Sackler is in possession of three. They are all showcased side by side in this exhibition. That in itself makes the trio truly special.

One of my favorite paintings from the series is Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings. What I find so striking is that key individuals, the international powerbrokers of the 17th century, so to speak, are brought together in a single moment. There is something audacious about the way Jahangir had his court artist Bichitr depict these eminent leaders as mere courtiers at Jahangir’s darbar (court). He manages not only to bring together an Ottoman Sultan and King James I of England (neither of whom ever visited India), but also makes the painting clearly favor the Sufi Shaikh Hussain (a religious scholar) over the foreign rulers. The white bearded figure is first in line, receiving a book from the emperor. Here the custodian of religion extends part of his garment to receive the book; it is an act of submission in front of the Mughal emperor, clearly placing Jahangir at the helm of authority.

Make no mistake: The painting is a bold statement by Jahangir. Some of the most powerful political figures of the early 17th century appear lined up below the emperor. The massive scale of Jahangir’s figure compared to the rest, coupled with his larger-than-life halo, further solidifies how this Mughal emperor saw himself as a world ruler.

Worlds within Worlds is on view at the Sackler Gallery through September 16. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to view all three allegorical portraits side by side!

Explore the paintings in greater depth on our website.