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bowers museum PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS CALIFORNIA BOUNTY: IMAGE AND IDENTITY, 1850-1930 ONGOING SPIRITS AND HEADHUNTERS: ART OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS ONGOING MIAO: MASTERS OF SILVER ONGOING SACRED REALMS: TEMPLE MURALS BY SHASHI DHOJ TULACHAN FROM THE GAYLE AND EDWARD P. ROSKI COLLECTION ONGOING California Bounty is the first curatorial interpretation of the museum’s distinguished painting collection since 1994. Viewers will take a rambling journey through California’s visual history, a history shaped by a unique mixture of Mexican and Anglo traditions as well as the state’s position on the Pacific Rim. Each painting epitomizes California’s land, people and offerings as a place of produce and plenty. The exhibition brings together many of the museum’s most cherished paintings, including works by early artists documenting the Mission and Rancho periods; landscapes by plein air painters portraying California’s coasts and canyons; sumptuous portraits and still-life paintings of flowers and paper-wrapped fruit by Alberta and William McCloskey; and a small selection of works indicating California as a continued place of possibility. Photographer Chris Rainier guest curated this exhibition of art from an area spanning the geographic region collectively referred to as Oceania. This comprehensive exhibition highlights masterworks from the three cultural regions of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Particular focus is placed on New Guinea, land of the headhunter, and the rich artistic traditions infused into daily and ritual life. Submerge into a visually stunning world and come face to face with larger-than-life masks, finely crafted feast bowls, objects associated with the secretive Sepik River men’s house, beautiful shell and feather currency, magic figures and tools of the shaman, objects related to seagoing trade routes, gorgeous personal adornments, weapons of warfare and the most precious of human trophies taken in retribution. Featuring over 250 intricate works of silver, Miao: Masters of Silver features jewelry and textiles primarily made in China’s Guizhou Province, where the largest population of Miao people reside. Male silversmiths create a variety of ornaments through casting, smelting, repoussé (a reverse hammering technique), forging, engraving, knitting, coiling, cutting, and other methods. Concepts such as beauty, unity, fortune, and pride are expressed as visual abstractions and geometric motifs. The nine oversized paintings shown in this exhibition are all the work of one extraordinary 69-year-old Buddhist monk named Shashi Dhoj Tulachan, a second generation thangka artist living in Tuksche, a remote village located in Mustang, Nepal’s northernmost district adjacent to Tibet. Shashi Dhoj Tulachan has devoted much of his life to the restoration of a nearby 18th century gompo (Tibetan monastery) known as the Chhairo Gompa. The paintings in this collection are not thangkas in the traditional sense. Thangkas are usually much smaller and are rolled on canvas so that they can be easily transported and hung anywhere for teaching. The thangkas exhibited here are similar in size to mural paintings found in monasteries. City Council 8 – 38 6/4/2024