$50,000 NEA Grant Goes to Art Museums

The University Art Museums has received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in support of the special exhibition "KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings, and Tigers," scheduled to open in fall 1997.

"At a time when the NEA is little appreciated, receipt of this grant should remind us all of the crucial role the Endowments play in our national cultural life and in the production of important scholarship," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the University Art Museums. "We are honored to have received this generous special exhibitions grant."

The exhibition, organized by the University Art Museums and the Asia Society, New York, is the first in the United States devoted to artistic production from a single Rajput court. The exhibition will include 68 paintings and 10 objects from the Royal Collections of the former state of Kotah, one of the most prolific artistic centers in north India from the 17th to the 19th centuries. The exhibition will explicate these visual arts of Kotah through historical, religious, anthropological, and art historical perspectives. As the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary presentation of visual arts from a single Rajput court, this exhibition will serve as a paradigm for future investigations of art and culture in pre-modern India. "KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings, and Tigers" is curated by Stuart Cary Welch, curator of Islamic and later Indian art Emeritus. The exhibition will tour internationally.
Visual arts from medieval India are important sources for understanding the dynamic processes of cultural formation, particularly when two ethnically and religiously distinct communities nourish each other's art forms through cultural symbiosis. Paintings and objects from the royal court of Kotah offer unique evidence for this process of cultural formation as it took place between Hindu Rajput kingdoms of western India and their sometime sovereigns, the Muslim Mughal emperors ruling from Delhi. Contrary to notions that Indian art is forever unchanging, artistic production from Kotah demonstrates that visual culture of pre-modern India was continually being reshaped through dynamic interaction between different political, religious, and cultural forces.

"KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings and Tigers" will trace this dynamic process of cultural formation as evident in the visual arts from one Hindu kingdom by tracing the origins and development of visual arts at Kotah from the kingdom's founding in the early 17th century through the mid-19th century, when Kotah was culturally incorporated into the larger world of colonial India.

The timing of "KOTAH: Its Gods, Kings, and Tigers" is fortuitous since it will coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence and will therefore be an occasion for reflection on India's pre-modern past in which Rajput rulers played an important cultural role. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and extensive educational programs.
For information on the University Art Museums, call 495-9400.