Darielle Mason to speak about the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s South Indian Temple Hall

The South Asian Studies Council at Yale welcomes Darielle Mason to its weekly Colloquium Series, where she will deliver a talk titled “Archaeology, Authenticity, and Interpretation: Revisiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s South Indian Temple Hall”.  Please note the different time and venue for this talk.

3:30pm, October 12 • Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street

Darielle Mason is The Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her exhibitions include Gods, Guardians and Lovers: Temple Sculptures from North India, A.D. 700-1200; Intimate Worlds: Indian Paintings from the Alvin O. Bellak Collection and Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection and the Stella Kramrisch Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (for which she received the 2010 Alfred H. Barr Award for Museum scholarship from the College Art Association).  She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, from where she obtained her Ph.D.

Abstract for “ Archaeology, Authenticity, and Interpretation: Revisiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s South Indian Temple Hall”

In 1912 a Philadelphia heiress purchased sixty-four carved granite architectural elements from a pile of rubble in a Krishna temple in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. In 1919 her family donated them to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  In 1921, the first installation of the “South Indian Mandapam” opened with a plan suggested by A. K. Coomaraswamy.  A decade later, W. Norman Brown travelled to Madurai and his investigation led to a new installation and a monograph.  During the next half century, Stella Kramrisch adjusted the installation’s atmosphere, but she did not alter its structure, nor did she question Brown’s convoluted hypothesis on the origin of the pieces.  My own research has involved a reexamination of the mandapa’s architectural history and its historiography.  The former has led to the reconstruction of a rare Ramayana relief, an alternative hypothesis for the building’s original format and setting, and a deeper understanding of the choices made by temple designers.  The latter has illuminated how some of the major figures of 20th century Indology pursued a quest for authenticity through repeated reconstruction of this Hindu sacred space inside a U.S. museum. It has also forced me to explore the concept ‘authenticity’ and to question its usefulness as I consider how to reinstall and reinterpret this key space for the 21st century.