Forrest McGill
Dancing villagers, approx. 1730, attributed to Pandit Seu (Indian, 1860-1740), Opaque watercolours on paper, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase, M.77.19.24
Dance is pivotal to Indian culture, spanning generations and forms, from the sacred dance of a god bringing the world into being to the elegance of a courtly performer before a maharaja to the glamour of modern Bollywood. Join us for a talk by Forrest McGill, Senior Curator at the Asian Art Museum, as he takes us through an insider’s view of the ongoing exhibition Beyond Bollywood at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, through encounters with artworks across Asia, South East Asia and the Himalayas, revealing the enduring capacity of dance to inspire a diverse range of artists and audiences alike.
The exhibition combines video, custom lighting and sound effects and special environments with 120 traditional artworks from 20 of the finest museums and private collections to create an immersive experience.
Insider’s View is MAP’s new series to explore the behind-the-scenes journey of different aspects of museums and exhibitions that inspire and engage the audience in different ways. Through the programme, museum professionals take the audience virtually to diverse institutions around the world and share stories, anecdotes, rewarding experiences, and challenges they face in conceptualising, and developing the project in focus.
Senior Curator
Forrest McGill is the Wattis Senior Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum. Previously a museum administrator and a teacher, curator, researcher, and writer in Asian art, McGill has worked at the Asian Art Museum for more than twenty years. Major exhibitions he organised or co-organised in recent years include The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe (2016); and Gorgeous, a joint project with SFMOMA (2014). He edited or co-edited the catalogues for these exhibitions. For the last several years he has been co-organising with the Cincinnati Art Museum the major exhibition Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in the Arts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan Region, at the Asian Art Museum.
Ways of Remembering: Engaging with Studio Photography & the Archive February 10, 2021
Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America February 13, 2021
How the Horse Shaped India February 26, 2021
Blurring the Lines: Fact, Fiction & Everything In-between February 27, 2021
Conservation: Now and the Future February 16, 2021
Mediating the Gaze in a Lens-based Culture March 10, 2021
