A talk by John Guy (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
A talk by John Guy (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
To accompany the Met Museum Exhibition,
“The Tree and the Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE - 400 CE.”
Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street
Discussant: Tamara I. Sears, Associate Professor of Art History, Rutgers University
John Guy is Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with research interests in the temple arts of the Hindu-Buddhist-Jain traditions, and in the ceramic and textile trade of the Indian Ocean diaspora. His recent major exhibitions include Interwoven Globe (2013) and Lost Kingdoms. Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014), and the current Met exhibition, The Tree and the Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE - 400 CE. Guy joined the Met's Asian Department in 2008 after 22 years at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where he was Senior Curator of Indian Art, with responsibility for the sculpture collections. He has acted as an advisor to UNESCO on historical sites in Southeast Asia and worked in partnership with government archaeological agencies in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, including at the sites of Wat Phu in Laos and My Son in Vietnam, assisting in documenting for World Heritage listing. Other projects have included maritime excavations, most recently the Hoi An shipwreck cargo in Vietnam, the Belitung shipwreck in Indonesia, and the Phanom Surin shipwreck cargo in Thailand.
Tamara Sears is Associate Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the art and architectural history of South Asia, with a particular focus on the Indian subcontinent. Her first book, Worldly Gurus and Spiritual Kings: Architecture and Asceticism in Medieval India (Yale University Press, 2014), received the PROSE award in Architecture and Urban Planning. She is currently completing a second book that examines the relationships among architecture, environmental history, and travel on local, regional, and global scales. A third book project, on architectural revivalism and rhetorics of secularism in twentieth century temple architecture, is currently underway. . She was recently elected Vice President of the American Council for Southern Asian Art, for a 4-year term beginning in September 2022, after which she will serve an additional term as President of ACSAA, from 2026-2030.