Gongs and Goodbyes as the Rubin Museum Shuts Its Doors
Published: 02:10 PM,Oct 19,2024 | EDITED : 06:10 PM,Oct 19,2024
Attendees at the soon-to-close Rubin Museum in Manhattan, Oct. 6, 2024.
On Oct. 6, the Rubin Museum of Art shut its doors, bringing to an end its two decades as a home for Himalayan art in the Manhattan neighborhood of Chelsea.
Thousands stopped by that day to enjoy free admission and traditional Tibetan music and dancing in a farewell ceremony as the Rubin becomes what it calls a “museum without walls.” The institution will focus on traveling exhibitions and long-term loans.
The museum opened in 2004 in the former women’s fashion wing of Barneys New York. Retaining the department store’s spiral steel-and-marble staircase, the reimagined space featured Tibetan Buddhist paintings and religious iconography.
In the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, a display of over 100 art and ritual objects arranged as a private household shrine, visitors were invited to physically commune with the Rubin by placing their hands on a chunk of the building’s foundation.
Nitin Ron, a museum docent at the Rubin for almost 20 years and a neonatologist, said an informal tour he was giving to friends on the final day grew to more than 50 people following him through the exhibitions.
“For every New Yorker and every person who has come here, I can see this magic in their eyes, this change in their eyes, when they walk into this museum and feel the energy,” he said.
The museum was founded by Donald and Shelley Rubin to promote their collection of Himalayan art objects, which began when the couple saw a painting of White Tara, the Buddhist deity of longevity, in an art gallery window on Madison Avenue in the mid-1970s.
On its final day, 2,850 people streamed through the museum’s doors to see the collection’s Buddhas and bodhisattvas as well as to stop by the interactive features and meditative spaces in the Mandala Lab exhibition one last time. Shelley Rubin and Tashi Chodron, the museum’s Himalayan programs and community ambassador, shut the building’s doors together before embracing.
“It’s been such a physical oasis,” said Rhonda Schaller, an administrator at the Pratt Institute who has been visiting the museum since it opened. “You could come in and leave the city behind, enter into a contemplative, beautiful environment that encouraged you to slow down, take a breath and revisit what mattered and why.”
The Rubins started their collection during a period of significant looting of religious items from shrines and temples in Nepal. In recent years, the museum has returned relics believed to be stolen.
Activist group Our Ancestors Say No protested at the Rubin’s closing ceremony, calling for the repatriation of sacred objects back to Tibetan and Himalayan communities and criticizing the shrine room’s next home at the Brooklyn Museum.
In a statement, the Rubin said it opposed the trafficking of stolen or looted cultural items, had not knowingly acquired looted objects and remained committed to conducting provenance research of its entire collection, which could result in repatriation.
Qiuyuhong Lu, a former intern at the Rubin and part of the Himalayan diaspora, visited the museum with her sketchbook for some last drawings of items on display. She said she had mixed emotions on the calls for repatriation.
“Morally speaking, I would love for them to be returned,” she said. “But at the same time, it also poses a difficult situation for people like me. I’ve never been to where my heritage is from. If I want to go see it, where is it going to be?”
Now the Rubin will sell its building and become an institution focused on long-term loans and traveling exhibitions, with the Mandala Lab having stopped in Milan earlier this year, one exhibition currently on view at a university in Ohio and another planned for a November opening in Chicago.
It is a bittersweet moment for museumgoers who valued a corner of the divine in the middle of Manhattan.
“It’s a loss,” said Claire Albritton, a longtime visitor who later became a Rubin docent. “I’d like to think that it’s going to be a void, but in the void are infinite possibilities.” —NYT
Thousands stopped by that day to enjoy free admission and traditional Tibetan music and dancing in a farewell ceremony as the Rubin becomes what it calls a “museum without walls.” The institution will focus on traveling exhibitions and long-term loans.
The museum opened in 2004 in the former women’s fashion wing of Barneys New York. Retaining the department store’s spiral steel-and-marble staircase, the reimagined space featured Tibetan Buddhist paintings and religious iconography.
In the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, a display of over 100 art and ritual objects arranged as a private household shrine, visitors were invited to physically commune with the Rubin by placing their hands on a chunk of the building’s foundation.
Nitin Ron, a museum docent at the Rubin for almost 20 years and a neonatologist, said an informal tour he was giving to friends on the final day grew to more than 50 people following him through the exhibitions.
“For every New Yorker and every person who has come here, I can see this magic in their eyes, this change in their eyes, when they walk into this museum and feel the energy,” he said.
The museum was founded by Donald and Shelley Rubin to promote their collection of Himalayan art objects, which began when the couple saw a painting of White Tara, the Buddhist deity of longevity, in an art gallery window on Madison Avenue in the mid-1970s.
On its final day, 2,850 people streamed through the museum’s doors to see the collection’s Buddhas and bodhisattvas as well as to stop by the interactive features and meditative spaces in the Mandala Lab exhibition one last time. Shelley Rubin and Tashi Chodron, the museum’s Himalayan programs and community ambassador, shut the building’s doors together before embracing.
“It’s been such a physical oasis,” said Rhonda Schaller, an administrator at the Pratt Institute who has been visiting the museum since it opened. “You could come in and leave the city behind, enter into a contemplative, beautiful environment that encouraged you to slow down, take a breath and revisit what mattered and why.”
The Rubins started their collection during a period of significant looting of religious items from shrines and temples in Nepal. In recent years, the museum has returned relics believed to be stolen.
Activist group Our Ancestors Say No protested at the Rubin’s closing ceremony, calling for the repatriation of sacred objects back to Tibetan and Himalayan communities and criticizing the shrine room’s next home at the Brooklyn Museum.
In a statement, the Rubin said it opposed the trafficking of stolen or looted cultural items, had not knowingly acquired looted objects and remained committed to conducting provenance research of its entire collection, which could result in repatriation.
Qiuyuhong Lu, a former intern at the Rubin and part of the Himalayan diaspora, visited the museum with her sketchbook for some last drawings of items on display. She said she had mixed emotions on the calls for repatriation.
“Morally speaking, I would love for them to be returned,” she said. “But at the same time, it also poses a difficult situation for people like me. I’ve never been to where my heritage is from. If I want to go see it, where is it going to be?”
Now the Rubin will sell its building and become an institution focused on long-term loans and traveling exhibitions, with the Mandala Lab having stopped in Milan earlier this year, one exhibition currently on view at a university in Ohio and another planned for a November opening in Chicago.
It is a bittersweet moment for museumgoers who valued a corner of the divine in the middle of Manhattan.
“It’s a loss,” said Claire Albritton, a longtime visitor who later became a Rubin docent. “I’d like to think that it’s going to be a void, but in the void are infinite possibilities.” —NYT