Religion and the Arts at the CSWR, 1995-2004
Conceiving a Museum of World Religions
Beginning in 1995, Lawrence E. Sullivan, then director of the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), convened a series of discussions around the creation of a museum of world religions as a conceptual project. Distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplines contributed to the consideration of such a museum.
In 1998, Sullivan and the CSWR began work on a second museum initiative, developing early content materials for the Museum of World Religions in Taipei, Taiwan. Conceived and sponsored by the Buddhist Dharma Master Hsin Tao, spiritual leader of the Ling Chiu Wusheng Monastery in Taipei, the Museum of World Religions aims to provide visitors with mutual understanding of the religions of the world through its collections, exhibitions, programs, research, and publications.
To inform the development of content for the Taipei museum, the Center convened a series of six national meetings in July 1999, hosted by different museums, including the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The meetings brought together over 150 leaders in multiple disciplines—including museum directors, curators, educators, fine artists, filmmakers, art historians, anthropologists, scholars of religion, and religious practitioners—to address questions involving the care, interpretation, and exhibition of religious artifacts.
The Museum of World Religions opened in 2002. For more information, see the architect's website and read the coverage from the Harvard Divinity School Office of Communications.
The Religion and the Arts Initiative
During the years 2000 to 2004, the CSWR extended this earlier work and established the Religion and the Arts Initiative (RAI), under the direction of Alison Edwards, to encourage the study of religion through the arts, as well as to address the ways in which the study of religion is critically important to museums as they wrestle with the politics of display, interpretation, and the specialized care of religious artifacts. The RAI included a constellation of research projects and events involving religion, the arts, and museums as part of a conceptual museum of world religions. This ideal "museum" was conceived of as a new kind of institution, one not limited to the display of objects.
The mission of the CSWR "museum" was to foster understanding of the diversity and richness of the world's religions in a multidisciplinary space for civic and social discourse—a holistic and broad vehicle of culture that includes attention to politics, performance, music, the media, economics, the healing arts, the plastic arts, literature, and debate in its exploration of the world's religions.
The Center's area of research on a museum of religions was designed to be in service to a broad constituency of museums internationally. Impassioned public debates surround the treatment of religion in museums, and the study of religion as it affects museum policy and practice is itself a critical area of inquiry. Although it is central to some of the most delicate and charged controversies museums face, religion is often an overlooked dimension in ongoing debates regarding the representation of cultures, the politics of display, and the care of sacred material.
Selected Projects of the RAI
Videos and other resources from the events sponsored by the RAI can be found on the Religion and Art Resource page of this website. Among the projects supported by the RAI:
"Designing a Museum of World Religions" course, spring 2001. The RAI supported research for the syllabus of this graduate-level course, taught by CSWR director Lawrence E. Sullivan, which offered interdisciplinary teams of graduate students the opportunity to explore the complex challenges that exist in creating public exhibitions (questions about the relationship of art to religion, education to entertainment, object to community, self-representation to representation of the "other") by creating an exhibition themselves.
Stewards of the Sacred: Sacred Artifacts, Religious Culture, and the Museum as Social Institution," Conference and Colloquia, 2001. In conjunction with the course, the RAI convened an international conference of museum directors on care of sacred objects and museum practice.
"Musings on Barbarous Beauty," a conversation series on art and the sacred, fall 2001. Designed and facilitated by Ronne Hartfield, museum consultant, this series gathered Harvard faculty, CSWR fellows, and outside experts in three meetings to consider this theme from the perspectives of religion, habitation, and exile; origins of identity; and religious paradox/ambiguity and materiality.
Artists-in-Residence. As well as sponsoring various art works and events, the RAI brought the artist Doris Salcedo, the filmmaker Stacey Steers, and the musicians Benjamin Bagby and Katarina Livljanic to the CSWR for residencies.
Museum Partners Project. The CSWR partnered with the Harvard University Native American Program, Harvard's Peabody Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Woodland Cultural Centre, and the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository to record and develop new models for museum/community partnerships and planning in the care, exhibition, and interpretation of religious and/or culturally sensitive material. The partner museums have developed precedents involving community partnerships, planning processes, and new practices for the care and handling, interpretation, and exhibition of religiously and culturally sensitive collections that have value to the wider museum field and to the study of religion in America. Some of the work of this project can be found in the book Stewards of the Sacred, edited by Lawrence E. Sullivan and Alison Edwards (2004; co-published with the American Association of Museums).
