Talks
Hidden in Plain Sight: Clay Sculpture in South Asia
Susan S. Bean
Image Credits: Alexander Burnes, Bamiyan Buddhas, print 1834
Air-dried clay stands among South Asia’s oldest and most widely used mediums for sculpture, along with stone, metal, wood, and fired clay. Typically finished in vivid colour, the medium has been largely overlooked in studies of the region’s arts, often misidentified as stucco and terracotta, or sidelined as too breakable and exuberantly coloured to be “art”’.
This talk brings together some of the most prominent practices across the subcontinent to consider why painted, air-dried clay has been so valued as a medium for figural sculpture, and what its sidelining reveals about the study of art and visual culture.
Bookings
Susan S. Bean
Susan S. Bean was Senior Curator of South Asian and Korean Art at the Peabody Essex Museum until her retirement. She currently serves as Chair of the Center for Art & Archaeology of the American Institute of Indian Studies and as an Associate of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Her new book, *Clay Works: Earthen Sculpture in South Asia*, repositions air-dried clay sculpture from the sidelines to the mainstream of the region’s art practices.
Dr. Bean holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. She served on the faculty of the Anthropology Department at Yale University and has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, Brown University, and Wellesley College. She specializes in the visual arts of modern South Asia.
Dr. Bean was instrumental in acquiring the renowned Herwitz Collection of Modern & Contemporary Indian Art, making the Peabody Essex Museum the first in the West to focus on Indian art from colonial times to the present. She established the Herwitz Gallery at PEM and curated a series of special exhibitions from the collection, culminating in *Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence* (2013).
Drawing on PEM’s archival and art collections pertaining to the early history of US–India connections, she curated two exhibitions and published *Yankee India: American Commercial and Cultural Encounters with India in the Age of Sail, 1784–1860* (2001). She also organised the first major travelling exhibition of art from Bhutan, co-curated with Diana Myers—*From the Land of the Thunder Dragon: Textile Arts of Bhutan* (1994–96)—and the accompanying volume (1994, reprinted 2008).
More at www.susanbean.com
