This week, Jared Bowen takes us through the new, permanent galleries of South Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum. Plus, a look at photographer Amani Willett’s book A Parallel Road and a review of the film Nomadland.
South Asian Art Galleries, on view at the Peabody Essex Museum
The Peabody Essex Museum is highlighting its extensive collection of Indian and South Asian art with an ongoing exhibition. In the South Asian Art galleries, viewers are treated to more than 100 paintings, sculptures, and photographs from colonial India through the modern era. At the start of the exhibition, audiences are immediately confronted by stereotypes crafted during a time when the British ruled the Indian subcontinent. From there, the exhibition opens into galleries installed floor to ceiling with art from India’s post-colonial period. It offers an explosion of color and expression from Indian artists, depicting themselves for themselves while also highlighting the bloody history of Partition that divided the country in 1947 and resulted in independence. At the center of this exhibition is a series of paintings by M.F. Husain inspired by the “Mahabharata”, an ancient Indian epic described as “the longest poem ever written.”
“The British had kind of strong art programs in India, and the South Asian artists that were going to these classes were looking at European art, following European modes of learning,” says Siddhartha V. Shah, Director of Education and Civic Engagement and Curator of South Asian Art at the Peabody Essex Museum. “Then into the more modern period, you had artists traveling abroad extensively [by way of] Rockefeller grants that brought a number of artists to New York, for example.”
'A Parallel Road,' a new book by Amani Willett
Photographer and Massachusetts College of Art and Design professor Amani Willett has written a new book about the Black American motoring experience. Titled A Parallel Road, the book presents Willett’s photography juxtaposed with archival imagery and references to the “Negro Motorist Green Book.” A Parallel Road lays bare the dangers and uncertainties that Black motorists have historically faced while travelling, many of which persist today.
“This sense of fear… being on an empty roadway at night… whether you're Black, white or whoever, it's something that can be a little jarring,” says Willett. “That's what I wanted people to feel when looking at the work.”
'Nomadland,' in theaters and streaming on Hulu February 19
In contrast to what Willett documents in her book, the new film Nomadland explores what life comprised of nothing but the open road represents. Directed by Chloé Zhao (Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider), Nomadland centers on Fern, an aging woman suddenly widowed and left with no home or job. She takes to the road, living out of a van and driving across the American west as a nomad. Frances McDormand (Fargo, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) stars in the film inspired by the real lives and travels of 21st century American nomads.
“It’s going to be one of the best movies of the year, and maybe even the best performance of [McDormand’s] career,” says Jared. “This is a film about life in its most distilled sense: what it is, how it is and what it means. Much of it is palpably rendered in McDormand’s face alone in what is a perfect performance.”
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