{"id":183723,"date":"2022-04-06T06:30:33","date_gmt":"2022-04-06T10:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=183723"},"modified":"2022-04-06T06:37:40","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T10:37:40","slug":"art-professor-shares-personal-collection-of-mithila-art-in-latest-exhibition-at-the-benton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2022\/04\/art-professor-shares-personal-collection-of-mithila-art-in-latest-exhibition-at-the-benton\/","title":{"rendered":"Art Professor Shares Personal Collection of Mithila Art in Latest Exhibition at the Benton"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kathryn Myers has made nearly two dozen trips over as many years to India, where her heart found Mithila art<\/a> by accident in 1999, and where she found a second home when she wasn\u2019t necessarily looking for one.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I first went to India, I was already 40 and you think you\u2019re old and you don\u2019t think anything new is coming,\u201d the painting professor<\/a> in the School of Fine Arts<\/a> says. \u201cYou\u2019re doing the same thing and there\u2019s a nice sense of stability. But when I went into the Handicrafts and Handloom Museum in New Delhi and saw Mithila and other forms of indigenous and tribal art, I felt like I was going to pass out I was so affected by this work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"School
School of Fine Arts painting professor Kathryn Myers talks about the significance of each element in this Mithila painting by Nisha Jha Chhath, “The Incredible Festival of India.” Myers curated Tradition and Transformation: Mithila Art of India, the latest exhibition at the William Benton Museum of Art. It runs though July 31. (Kimberly Phillips \/ UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She bought her first pieces at a craft fair where standard depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses were primarily marketed for tourists. Through the years her collection grew, and Myers says she just couldn\u2019t satisfy the desire to see more.<\/p>\n

She came home from that first trip and studied the three major styles of Mithila art and learned the stories of deities, as well as the different castes in Hindu culture that determine some of the style differentiations of Mithila art. Later, she returned to India to the small town of Madhubani to watch the artists\u2019 freehand technique of drawing with ink on paper and their process of starting with the creation of a border and working inward to the center.<\/p>\n

She created the UConn class \u201cIndian Art and Popular Culture: Independence to the Present\u201d from scratch in 2005 and curated two shows in 2004 and 2013<\/a> at the William Benton Museum of Art<\/a> centering on Indian art.<\/p>\n

Her third, \u201cTradition and Transformation: Mithila Art of India,\u201d<\/a> puts her collection of now 40 pieces of Mithila art<\/a> on display at the Benton until July 31.<\/p>\n

No one knows just how long Mithila art<\/a> has been around, Myers explains, but most conjecture states at least 700 years. It originates in a part of India that\u2019s remote \u2013 five hours outside the nearest city in the northeastern part of the country and in villages dotted with thatched huts and cinder block structures. There, women paint Mithila murals on the walls of their homes to celebrate weddings and other events.<\/p>\n

British colonial officer William Archer is generally credited with bringing a greater awareness of Mithila art to the mainstream, after he was in the area on a humanitarian mission following an earthquake in 1934 and found the murals in the rubble of homes, she says. Years later, with the help of Indian crafts agencies and non-governmental organizations, Mithila artists were encouraged to create works on paper to sell in tourist markets to both earn a living and preserve the tradition.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one outside the immediate area had ever seen this artwork before,\u201d Myers says of Archer\u2019s discovery. \u201cIt was described as hidden from history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, as well as continuing to depict images of Hindu deities, many Mithila artists also draw from current events.<\/p>\n

\""Krishna
“Krishna Stealing the Saris of the Gopies” by Naresh Kumar Paswan (contributed photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the Benton exhibit, visitors can see the painting \u201c9-11\u201d by Leela Devi, which depicts the twin towers and two airplanes, along with \u201cResponsibilities of Women During Covid\u201d by Vinita Jha and her characters in masks performing chores around the home.<\/p>\n

But there are plenty of traditional paintings of agrarian life in the exhibit, with fish and trees and plants, as Myers says many of the artists have become adept at fluctuating between the styles once defined by caste and traditional and contemporary subjects.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Poor Girl and the Squirrel\u201d by Arti Kumari tells the story of a young girl who falls in love with and marries a squirrel. People ridicule her for the act, Myers says, the squirrel is killed, and the girl burns herself on the funeral pyre, in a now outlawed practice called sati<\/a> during which a widow would burn herself to ash on her husband\u2019s funeral pyre.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are the traditions of certain places, and the art reflects that,\u201d Myers says.<\/p>\n

She says she\u2019s fond of the Dulari Devi painting, \u201cKrishna Stealing the Saris of the Gopis,\u201d which shows the god Krishna<\/a> playing his flute and entrancing the Gopis who are falling in love despite his adolescent prank of taking their clothes.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s unusual in this work, Myers says, is that while in other painting traditions the women are often depicted nude — in various states of contortion as they try to cover their bodies — in these images only the women\u2019s legs are bare. She suggests that\u2019s because Mithila art is so much about obsessively detailed patterns and without clothing there\u2019s nothing on the bare skin to pattern.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese themes have been painted over and over again by artists,\u201d she says. \u201cThat always impresses me, that you can take an old theme or a deity that\u2019s been painted thousands of times and find something new in it, find something to make it fresh.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are at least four paintings in the Benton exhibit that depict Krishna.<\/p>\n

She also likes Dulari Devi\u2019s \u201cMarriage Preparations\u201d and the way it shows all of the ceremonies leading up to a wedding from henna tattoos to feasting: \u201cI just love the denseness and the joyfulness of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Benton exhibit, which was postponed in the pandemic, benefitted from the delay, Myers says.<\/p>\n

Originally, she planned to showcase a variety of indigenous art, in addition to her personal collection of about 20 Mithila pieces. But that changed when David Szanton from the Ethnic Arts Foundation<\/a> approached her to offer an additional 20. The organization is closing after 42 years and is disbursing its collection to artists, historians, and curators with the caveat that it be publicly available.<\/p>\n

\""Earthquake
“Earthquake in Nepal” by Rani Jha (contributed photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Myers says that after the Benton exhibit, she plans to take part of the collection to the Floyd Art Center in Virginia for a co-curated exhibition on Mithila art and then back to Connecticut where it\u2019ll be on display in 2023 at UConn Avery Point<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this may be the last show for Myers at the Benton.<\/p>\n

After three Fulbright Fellowships to India in 2002, 2011, and 2020 and a video cataloging project<\/a> including interviews with contemporary Mithila artists, Myers says she\u2019s looking to retire at some point in the next two years and jokes that she\u2019ll get a camper and take the show on the road.<\/p>\n

What is certain is she plans to return to India next winter, to the place that changed the course of her academic research and the direction of her own art.<\/p>\n

That first trip to India for an artist residency in 1999 turned her from the work she had been doing on life-sized baroque imagery with a contemporary touch<\/a> to small-scale watercolors of Indian architecture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She says she \u201cwas just so stimulated by the environment that I started making paintings of what I saw. It used to be figures and spaces, but then after awhile I realized I was like an outsider looking at Indians and their spaces.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the years I\u2019ve spent so much time there I thought, \u2018It\u2019s my place, too,\u2019\u201d she continues, \u201cso the figures disappeared, and it became about space and architecture and these interesting arrangements of buildings around me in my world.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There will be three April events in conjunction with \u201cTradition and Transformation: Mithila Art of India.\u201d A panel discussion, \u201cTradition & Transformation In Indigenous Arts of South Asia,\u201d<\/a> will be held at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 6, at the museum; an interactive workshop, \u201cThe Magic of Mithila Art,\u201d<\/a> will be held at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 12, via Zoom; and a discussion about art, \u201cChanging Times, Changing Art: A Conversation,\u201d<\/a> will be held at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 13, in the Art Building.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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