Vidya Dehejia awarded the 2023 Freer Medal by the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art
Freer Medal Lecture and Award Ceremony:
Honoring Vidya Dehejia
April 28, 2023, from 6–8 p.m. EST
at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Tickets are free, and registration is required here.
The Freer Medal is a lifetime achievement award that honors individuals who have made substantial contributions to the understanding of the arts of Asia throughout their career. This spring, the honor will go to Vidya Dehejia, the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor Emerita of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University, who will be honored for her lifetime work in South Asian art. The lecture and award ceremony will be held in the Meyer Auditorium. A reception in the Freer courtyard will follow.
Vidya Dehejia’s groundbreaking research spans millennia, from ancient Buddhist rock-cut architecture to colonial-period photography. Her work on wide-ranging topics, including visual narrative, gender, the meaning of the unfinished, medieval yogini temples, Chola bronzes, and artistic production during the British Raj, has staked out new fields of inquiry for the interpretation of Asian art, while her translations of Tamil poetry and Sanskrit texts have set a standard for art historical rigor. At Columbia University, as professor of South Asian art history from 1982 to 2003 and as the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art from 2003 to 2021, Dehejia taught and shaped a generation of scholars. She also served as the director for the South Asia Institute at Columbia University (2003–2008) and was the acting director, deputy director, chief curator, and curator of South and Southeast Asian art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, now the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (1994–2002), where she was responsible for several highly innovative exhibitions and scholarly catalogs.
Dehejia holds a bachelor of arts, a master of arts, and a doctorate degree from Cambridge University and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Xavier’s College, Bombay University. Highlights from her impressive list of publications include Devi, The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art (1999), India through the Lens: Photography 1840–1911 (2000), The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India (2002), The Body Adorned: Dissolving Boundaries Between Sacred and Profane in India’s Art (2009), The Unfinished: Stone Carvers at Work on the Indian Subcontinent (with Peter Rockwell, 2015) and The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Sacred Bronzes from Chola India, 855–1280 (2021), based on her 2016 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.
The recipient of many prestigious national and international awards, Dehejia received the Padma Bhushan Award in 2012 from the president of India for exceptional contributions to art and education as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship from 2009 to 2012. She was the 65th A.W. Mellon Lecturer in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in 2016.
