This special exhibition marks the completion of an extensive project to conserve the Mead Art Museum’s collection of thangka (pronounced “tan-kah”)—scroll paintings of Buddhist figures. So fragile that they have remained largely inaccessible to scholars and museum visitors for nearly six decades, Amherst College’s eighteen thangka, primarily from Tibet, have been gently cleaned, stabilized, and repaired by conservators at Museum Textile Services in Andover, Massachusetts, under the leadership of Camille Myers Breeze. A generous grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and additional support from the Amherst College Department of Religion underwrote the conservation treatment. The Louis and Nettie Horch Foundation provided further support for the conservation of one thangka.
For more information, visit www.amherst.edu/museums/mead/programs/2011exhib/picturingenlightenment.
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