New York-based collector Alice S. Kandell can’t exactly pinpoint what drew her to Tibetan art, but she suspects it might have been the immersive experience she had in the 1960s, when she traveled to Sikkim — a state in northeast India bordered by Bhutan, Tibet and Nepal.
That and the fact that her college friend became the queen of Sikkim, and she was invited to the coronation.
No, that isn’t a typo. Her friend happened to meet a man in Darjeeling who was the crown prince of Sikkim. The two fell in love and married.
When Kandell received an invitation to their crowning as king and queen, she knew she had to go, but she was in graduate school for psychology at Harvard and taking time off was frowned upon. When she asked her adviser if she could go, he said: “When fantasy becomes reality, a member of the Harvard psychology department should be there to witness it!”
What began as a trip around the world evolved into a fascination with the religious objects and art of Tibet that refugees were forced to sell to pay for their journey into exile during the Chinese invasion. Kandell was taken by the artwork, and over the years she amassed enough objects to make a shrine in her New York City apartment. It became too much, and she knew that even though she bought it, it wasn’t really hers. When she bought a work, she promised the people she would keep it and that it wouldn’t end up on the secondary art market.
The first room went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, and the second “Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room” is now home at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Some 200 objects — including gilt-bronze sculptures, paintings (thangkas), silk hangings, carpets, prayer beads, peacock feathers, silver bells and more created in Tibet between the 1300s and 1900s — invite visitors to experience them.
Inside the shrine
A low and consistent humming chant from Buddhist monks pulses, audible from the next room. A tilted rectangle of light guides visitors through the open door portal. Inside, the shrine centerpiece is a gilt bronze sculpture of Akshobhya (Shakyamuni) portraying him just moments after his enlightenment. Other sculptures flank him, such as Standing Maitreya, a bodhisattva, a spiritual being on the path to enlightenment, the female deity Green Tara, a personification of wisdom, Vajradhara, a manifestation of Buddha’s teachings, and more.
Painted dragons are mounted on the tops of ceiling beams. Brightly painted thangkas filled with repeating patterns of the deities fill the compact shrine. One thangka has an image of Green Tara repeated 526 times, a gesture toward her limitless compassion for those who are suffering.