The Home Page of
Michael W. Meister
Michael W. Meister, W. Norman Brown
Professor of South Asia Studies in the
Department of the History of Art, is a specialist in the art of India and Pakistan.
He has served as chair of the Department of
South Asia Studies(SASt) and director of
Penn's South Asia Center; he is curator of Indian art, Asian
section,
University
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; and curator of the South
Asia Art Archive.
His research focuses on temple architecture,
the
morphology
of meaning, and other aspects of the
art of the Indian sub-continent.
Recent News
Students in a Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar taught in fall 2007 have
constructed an exhibition, Multiple Modernities: India 1906-2006,
that will be on display in the William Wood Gallery, Philadelphia
Museum
of Art, in the summer and fall, 2008.
An exhibition, Tigar By the Tail! Women Artists of India
Transforming Culture, will be on
display at the
Arthur Ross Gallery August
26-October 26, 2008. A catalogue will be available.
An exhibition of Modern Indian Works on Paper,
Post-Independence Art from a Private Collection, was exhibited in
the
Arthur Ross Gallery in 2007. A
catalogue is available.
Graduate students in the
History of Art at Penn joined Professors Meister and Deborah
Klimburg-Salter and students from
the University of Vienna for a research tour of temples and monasteries in Himachal Pradesh in
June 2004. For a report on this project and its scholarly outcome, see the
article "
Say No, and No, Until You Have to Say Yes" in the spring 2006
Penn Arts & Sciences Magazine.
Proceedings of the international
symposium on
Traditional
and Vernacular
Architecture, coordinated by
Michael W. Meister with Deborah Thiagarajan and edited by Subashree
Krishnaswami, have been published by the
DakshinaChitra of the
Madras Craft
Foundation
(2003).
See the Mary
B. Wheeler Special South Asia Image Collection website under
construction at Penn.
The exhibition Intimate
Worlds: Masterpieces of Indian Painting from the Alvin O. Bellak
Collection documented a major recent gift of Indian miniatures to
the
Philadelphia Museum of
Art.
- The exhibition
"Jains as Temple Worshipers:
Architecture and Planning," one result of the "Continuities of
Community Patronage" project, was displayed in the
Architectural
Archives at the University of Pennsylvania in conjunction with an
exhibition of Jain art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A volume of essays documenting this project by L. A. Babb, John E. Cort,
and Michael W. Meister, Desert
Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical, Art-Historical, and
Social Contexts, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, was released in
April 2008.
-
A previously unknown temple
has been excavated in North Kafirkot, NWFP, Pakistan, as part of the
ongoing Salt Range Temple Project.
- The
New
York Times
reviewed the
Cooking for the Gods exhibition, curated by Professor Meister and Pika
Ghosh, in 1996. (To see the Philadelphia Museum of Art's Durga bronze in
Cooking for the Gods, click here.)
- The
New York Times has reported scientific evidence that heat is
emitted by India's sacred lotus.
Graduate-Student News
- John Henry Rice has been appointed as a deputy curator in
South
Asian and Islamic art at
the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.
-
Melissa
Kerin plans to submit her dissertation this summer (2008). She and
John
Henry Rice are moving to Richmond, Virginia, where John
Henry has accepted a curatorial position. Melissa and John Henry
both received Fulbright-Hayes awards for
dissertation research in India in 2004-05. They each have also
curated gallery installations at the Philadelphia Museum: "Divine
Union: The Transformation of Desire in
Himalayan Art," and "India's
Middle Ground: Art of the Deccan."
- Meredith Malone completed her M.A. thesis in
the
History
of Art on
"Sacred Icons: Secular Peddlers, Contemporary Chromolithographic Hindu God
Posters" and is continuing toward the Ph.D.
-
Beth Citron is currently completing her dissertation research in
Mumbai on a
Fulbright Fellowship.
- Pushkar Sohoni has received a dissertation research fellowship
from the American Institute of Indian Studies for 2008-09.
- Beth Citron, Mandhavi Mehta, and Pushkar Sohoni joined Professors Meister, Deborah
Klimburg-Salter, and graduate students from
the University of Vienna for a study-tour of temples and monasteries in Himachal Pradesh in
June 2004, with support from the University Research Foundation and the Department of the History of
Art.
Alums
- Chandreyi
Basu, has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
in the Art
History Department at St. Lawrence University. She has published a
catalogue of the Nalin collection of Gandharan
art, Displaying Many Faces, Art and Ghandharan Identity.
- Pika
Ghosh, tenured Associate Professor at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, has published articles in
Res, Artibus Asiae, and Expedition.
Her manuscript, Temple
to Love: Architecture
and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Bengal, received the
AIIS Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Humanities and was
published by Indiana University Press in 2005.
-
Katherine
Hacker holds a tenured position at the
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and has recently
published articles
in
Res.
- Darielle
Mason, Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, organised the exhibition and catalogue,
Intimate
Worlds: Masterpieces of Indian Painting from the Alvin O. Bellak
Collection. She is currently developing a pan-Asian exhibition on
Avalokitesvara.
-
Suchitra
Mattai's M.A. thesis, "Reclaiming the Icon: A
Study of Space and Ideology in Contemporary Indian Art," for the
South Asia
Regional
Studies Department has been completed and she has
received an MFA from the Graduate School of Fine Arts. She is currently
on the faculty of the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's
University.
- Tamara
Sears, currently an Assistant Professor at New York University,
has received a Getty post-doctoral fellowship for 2008-2009 and has
accepted an Assistant Professorship at Yale.She has published articles in
South Asian Studies and Art Bulletin.
- Ajay
Sinha, Professor and Chair of Art History in the
Department of Art and Art
History at Mount Holyoke
College, has published Imagining
Architects: Creativity in the Religious Monuments of India with
the University of Delaware Press. He has also recently co-edited a book
on
Bollywood films.
-
Anna
Sloan, has been appointed Assistant Professor in
the History of Art Department and Asian Languages and Cultures at the
University of Michigan. She had taught at Moore College of Art and the
University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student
and published Adam's
House in the Black Belt, an artist's book printed by Landfall Press, then held
a
post-doctoral fellowship
at Smith
College. As a visiting Assistant Professor there, she organised
an exhibition The
Way I Remember Them, Paintings of Nusra Latif Kureshi. She
also helped organise an exhibition,
Karkhana,
reviewed in
The New York Times,
and was
a
visiting professor at Mount Holyoke College in 2005-06.
- Nadine
Zubair, whose M.A. thesis, "Gandhara Architecture and Its
Representation," was completed for South Asia Regional Studies in 1997,
returned to graduate studies at Florida State
University.
- Cooking
for the
Gods, Newark Museum Exhibition
- Documentation of Salt Range Temples,
Pakistan
- Early Indian architecture:
Coomaraswamy: Early Indian Architecture; Renou, "The
Vedic House" in Res; and "Notes Toward the
Study of Representations of Early Indian Architecture, Kanganhalli" in
Prasadam have been published.
- Pilgrimage Temples in Rajasthan:
The J. Paul Getty Foundation Interpretive Research project,
"Continuities of Community Patronage," undertaken with John Cort and
L. A. Babb, and the thematic seminar
sponsored by the Center for the Advanced Study of India,
have led in part to two edited volumes, Ethnography and Personhood:
Notes From the Field (Jaipur 2000) and Multiple Histories:
Culture and Society in the Study of Rajasthan (Jaipur 2002). A preliminary report on results of the Getty project, "Self-Preservation and
the Life of Temples," is available on-line. A volume of essays
documenting this project, Desert
Temples: Sacred Centers of Rajasthan in Historical, Art-Historical, and
Social Contexts, Jaipur: Rawat Publications, was published in
April 2008.
Spring 2008
- research leave
- 'Social, Symbolic, and Formal Origins of the Indian
Temple' lectures, History of Art Department,University of Vienna,
May 2008
Fall 2007
Spring 2007
2006
2005
- ARTH
515 (SAST 515), Aspects of Indian Architecture: Social, Symbolic, and
Formal Origins of the Indian Temple
- Fall 04-Spring 05: sabbatical research
2004
2003
2002
-
Arth
104 (SARS 201/SARS501),
Introduction to Art in South Asia
- Arth 599, Research Seminar, South Asia Art Archive
2001
2000
-
Arth 212, Cities and Temples in Ancient India
-
Arth 514, Aspects of Indian Art: Workshop in Indian
Architecture
1999
-
Arth 212, Cities and Temples in Ancient India
-
Arth 301, Living Monuments: India
-
Arth 711, Creation of an Iconic Sculpture
- Arth
711, Seminar in Indian Art: Sculpture
1998
- Arth
104, Introduction to Asian Art: South and Southeast Asia
- Arth
515, Proseminar in Indian Architecture
Previous Semesters
- Arth 009,
Writing About Asian Art
- Arth 104,
Introduction to Asian Art: South and Southeast Asia (1996)
500-level Undergraduate/Graduate Proseminars (topics vary from
year to year):
700-level Graduate
Seminars (topics vary from year to year):
Essays Available On-Line
Essays
available on-line:
- Text
and
illustrations for Man and Man-Lion:
The Philadelphia Narasimha (Artibus Asiae 56 [1996.3]:
291-301).
- A Madison
South-Asia conference lecture given by Professor Meister on "Cosmos in
a Teacup" with text and
images attached. The final published version, "The Unity and
Gravity of an Elemental Architecture," is below.
-
Self Preservation and the Life of Temples, presented at the
ACSAA
symposium, Charleston, S.C., provides a preliminary report on the
Continuities of
Community Patronage project.
-
Temples Along the Indus, Expedition,
38.3 (1996): 41-54. [.pdf available]
- Discovery of a New Temple on the Indus, Expedition
42.1 (2000): 37-46. [.pdf available]
-
The Unity and Gravity of
an Elemental Architecture, from Prakrti: The Integral Vision,
5 vols., ed. Kapila Vatsyayan; vol. 3, The Agamic Tradition and the
Arts, ed. Bettina Baumer. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1995.
-
Louis Renou's
'The
Vedic House', Res, Anthropology and
Aesthetics 34 (1998): 143-61. (In this format this lacks
its endnotes.)
last modified 16/April/2008
Michael W. Meister,
mmeister@sas.upenn.edu
