Current Exhibitions

Wafting on a Heavenly Breeze: Hand-Painted Kites from China

May 22–August 10, 2008

Dragons, phoenixes, snakes, bats, and mythical figures fill the sky in this exhibition of hand-crafted kites using traditional materials—bamboo, paper, and silk. The majority of these kites come from Weifang, the birthplace of kite making.

This exhibition will replace the “Beyond Chinggis Khan: Mongolian Buddhist Art from the Rubin Museum of Art” which has been cancelled.

Art Now: Recent Acquisitions in Photography and Film/Video

Overbrook Gallery
January 3-August 10

For the past eight years the Project in Contemporary Photography and Film/Video has offered students the opportunity to participate in the selection of works of art for the Museum collection. Over the course of the spring the various Art Now installations will feature videos by Tracy Moffett, Jacco Olivier, and the Swiss team of Fischli and Weiss, along with photographs by Roger Ballen, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others.

Tombs, Temples, Palaces, and Tea: The Social Roles of Ceramics in Asia

Robert F. Reiff Gallery
February 21-December 7

This exhibition explores the practical and social uses of ceramics in Asia.
Asian ceramics are the most varied in the world: they have been used for vessels, ritual objects, sculpture, and for even architectural ornament. They are also unrivaled in technical quality and in their sheer volume.

Ancient Mediterranean and Early European Art

Lower Gallery
Ongoing

On view in this updated and revised installation are recent acquisitions in Egyptian and Mesopotamian art as well as Greek, Roman, and medieval European objects from the Museum’s permanent collection. Highlights include an Egyptian Old Kingdom relief and an early fifteenth-century Italian panel painting.

European and American Art

Cerf Gallery
Ongoing

This installation, which changes regularly, features highlights of the Museum’s collection of Western art from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. Landscapes by American painters Jasper Cropsey and John Frederick Kensett are on view alongside sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European religious and devotional images and American and European sculpture.

Robert F. Reiff Gallery of Asian Art

Ongoing

This installation features a wide range of East Asian ceramics, including Chinese ceramic funerary sculpture from the Han (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.) to Tang (618–906) dynasties, celadons and other wares of the Song dynasty (960–1279), and blue-and-white enameled porcelains of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Korean celadons and Japanese tea ceremony wares will also be represented.