The formation of a canon of South Asian art in the early twentieth century was clearly affected by the well known scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy, who joined the Boston Museum of Art in 1917 as much of his sizable collection of South Asian Art was acquired for the museum. A conversation between the Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian Art at the Boston Museum Dr. Laura Weinstein and Dr. Janice Leoshko considers the ways to historicize and understand the significance of Coomaraswamy’s legacy.
Dr. Laura Weinstein became the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Curator of Indian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2009. Her earliest research for her dissertation complete at Columbia University concerned the ways in which 16th-century Persian manuscripts produced at sites on India’s Deccan Plateau adapted and transformed Persianate painting styles. She has developed these issues in further writing over the last decade while she completed a major reinstallation of the Museum’s collection. Other projects include the development of an innovative volume on the Boston collection and writing on diverse subjects ranging from the photographs of Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh and Ananda Coomaraswamy’s engagement with modern dance.
Supported by Dept. of Art and Art History, Yew Fund, South Asian Institute