CSUEB Professor’s Teaching Collection of Sacred Objects Featured in Virtual Art Exhibition
This bronze sculpture called Shiva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, is one of the current objects featured in the Graduate Theological Union’s virtual exhibition of the Collection of Sacred World Art and is considered one of the best-known images of Indian art.
- March 12, 2021
The extensive teaching collection of sacred objects assembled by Lanier Graham, Cal State East Bay’s Art Museum and Gallery Studies Certificate program director and adjunct professor, will be on display in a series of virtual exhibitions presented by the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California this summer.
The GTU, a center for advanced religious studies programs, is currently featuring 40 of the over 500 spiritual and ritual artifacts that make up the Sacred World Art Collection. This teaching collection was donated to the GTU in 2014 by the Institute for Aesthetic Development, a charity headed by Graham and his wife Gloria K. Smith.
“I consider the creation of the teaching museum focused on the Graduate Theological Union’s Collection of Sacred World Art to be one of the most significant new developments in theological education nationally and globally,” said the past president of the GTU, Riess Potterveld, in accepting the donation of works.
Before becoming the collection it is today, Graham used the objects as teaching aids in the university art courses he taught throughout his career. Graham refers to this as "Tactile Teaching,” and says CSUEB became an experimental "proving ground" for teaching by touch.
“When I began teaching World Art at CSUEB in 1993, I decided to bring at least one object to every lecture—not just so the students could see actual art, but so they could touch actual history,” said Graham. “The best of all these teaching aids—the ones that moved the students most deeply—became the GTU Teaching Collection of Sacred World Art.”
The exhibition, supported by the Jane Dillenberger Fine Arts Endowment Fund, is the first step to present objects from the collection in an online format after cancelling the physical exhibition due to the pandemic.
In addition to the current exhibit, the GTU will host the SPIRIT-MATTER virtual exhibit later in summer and publish a two-volume exhibition catalogue online and in print to provide a closer look at the Sacred World Art Collection.
To learn more about the Sacred World Art Collection and explore the featured exhibit, visit: https://www.gtu.edu/sacred-world/