Smithsonian goes to the mat for yoga - Pueblo Chieftain

WASHINGTON — Yoga is moving from the studio mat to the museum gallery.

The Smithsonian Institution has organized what curators believe is the first exhibition about the visual history and art of yoga, its origins and evolution over time.

The Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery will showcase the exhibit, “Yoga: The Art of Transformation,” through January. Later, it will travel to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Curators brought together Indian sculptures, manuscripts and paintings, as well as posters, illustrations, photographs and films to showcase yoga’s history over 2,000 years.

Museum Director Julian Raby said years of research behind the exhibit shed new light on yoga’s meanings and histories.

“It examines for the first time a spectacular, but until now largely ignored, archive,” he said. “That archive is India’s visual culture of extraordinary yoga-related artworks created, as you will see, over some two millennia.”

Guest teachers will lead yoga classes in the museum’s galleries on Wednesdays and Sundays. The museum also will host a symposium for scholars and enthusiasts on yoga’s visual culture.

Curator Debra Diamond said the Smithsonian borrowed some of the greatest masterpieces in Indian art as well as pieces that have never been shown before.

The exhibit examines the concepts and practices of yoga traditions, including meditation and postures found in Indian art dating back hundreds of years. The first piece is an 11th century sculpture representing a yoga teacher, seated in the lotus posture with legs crossed to signify enlightenment.

Such sculptures were displayed in Hindu temples so people could see the teacher and “understand yoga’s transformative potential,” Diamond said.

Perceptions of yoga helped determine how the tradition developed, and knowing that background is important for how Americans think about yoga today, Diamond said.

“There are so many debates and contestations about what yoga is in America,” she said. “Is it a profound individual embodied system of transformation? Or is it the thing that spawned a $5 billion industry in which yoga is used to sell cars?”