The exhibition was the world’s first exhibition of yogic art. Featuring temple sculptures, devotional icons, vibrant manuscripts, and court paintings from India, drawn over a period of 2000 years, and also including photographs, books and films from the nineteenth and early 20th century, the exhibition was an attempt to show the depth and influence yoga has had on Indian culture.
133 objet d’arts including stone and bronze sculptures, illustrated manuscripts and court paintings from 25 museums from all the world and private collections were displayed. Notable displays included the 12-foot scroll of the human body, displaying all the chakras or energy centers, and the earliest illustrated Yoga Vasistha, which is an important Indian text on philosophy. Other objects included folios from the very first illustrated text on asanas and hatha yoga, from 1600 AD. The Yoga Narasimha from the mid-thirteenth century AD, Tamil Nadu, South India, is also a relatively unique depiction of this half-man half-lion god. Swami Vivekananda’s address and participation in the 1893 World Parliament of Religions and his Vedanta philosophy, also find space in the exhibit.
The show was organized by Debra Diamond, associate curator of South and Southeast Asian Art. Diamond began work on the exhibition in 90s, with a large team featuring expertise on religion, history, Sanskrit, Islam, philology, India and art history. “For anyone who practices yoga — pretty much any kind of yoga today — anywhere in the world, there are things in this exhibition that will be familiar and there will be things that are totally unfamiliar,” Diamond said. “Yoga is much more than any of us knew. I mean, the more I worked on this project, the less I knew about yoga and the larger it got.”
“I think people like me, art historians, we were looking for images that reflected what we saw today,” she added. “We gradually learned — as these other scholars were working in these other fields — yoga was quite complex and many different things at different times.”
