Online Talk
A Closer Look: Popular Prints of Modern Bengal
Laura Weinstein
Image Credits: Sri Sri Krishna Balaram, about 1910–20, chromolithograph. Printed and published by Kansaripara Art Studio. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Marshall H. Gould Fund, 2017.3953
Curator Laura Weinstein discusses artworks from the exhibition Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal, on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. This exhibition explores the popular devotional art that were made through lithographic printing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Calcutta (now Kolkata). These vibrant and accessible mass-produced images brought the divine into everyday life, offering devotees new ways to engage with their gods, and reshaping spiritual experiences in colonial India.
Laura Weinstein
Laura Weinstein is Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2011. She first came to the MFA in 2009, and within the first two years she led the reinstallation of the Museum’s South Asian and Southeast Asian collections.
In subsequent years she reinstalled the Islamic art collection, curated exhibitions including Megacities Asia and the traveling exhibition Ink, Silk & Gold: Islamic Art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and led many smaller exhibitions drawing on the MFA’s rich holdings of Indian paintings. She is the author of several MFA catalogs as well as a range of scholarly publications dealing with subjects ranging from Indo-Persian manuscript of the 16th century, to the career of Ananda Coomaraswamy, to 19th-century Indian photography.
