Holiday Time Travel

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin


Save the date for the Burke’s holiday event – Magic Lanterns and the Birth of Photography – Sat., Dec. 30.

Bring in the new year by stepping back through time to enjoy authentic 19th century entertainment with the technology that was the forerunner to motion pictures. A huge fad in the 1800’s, thousands of “Magic Lantern Shows” toured the country presenting fun and boisterous travelogues, history, and storytelling. Members of the Seattle Chapter of the Magic Lantern Society will present some of these shows verbatim, using text and slides from the original presentations – should be fun for history buffs.

When: Sat., Dec. 30 | 10 am – 4 pm
Where: Burke Museum
What: Magic Lantern slideshow performances scheduled throughout the day; each show lasts approx. 20-30 minutes.
Who: Presented by the Burke and the Seattle Chapter of the Magic Lantern Society
Why: Because the holidays are all about nostalgia, even for things that predate us by centuries!

Photos courtesy the Magic Lantern Society.

- Rebecca

Meet the press

Posted by: Karyn Gregory

Friday was my first chance to take a peek at the Vanished Kingdoms exhibit. I also had the opportunity to tag along during press interviews with Vanished Kingdoms author and curator, Mabel Cabot, whose mother was one of the American explorers who took many of the exhibit's photographs from 1921-1925 during expeditions through China and Tibet.

In an earlier blog, my colleague Rebecca said that a lot of the images looked like paintings instead of photographs. Mabel Cabot was able to explain how that effect was achieved: after the film had been turned into lantern slides, they were taken to a Chinese painter who painted directly on the slides to add color. The result is a fantastic, very surreal look at life in Tibet, Mongolia, and China.

These colors must be seen to be believed. If you make it, be sure to take a look at the silver shield image. The shield itself was probably made in the 12th c. CE and the detail of the photograph (heightened by the painting) is phenomenal.

-Karyn

Tibetan Art Installation

Posted by: Rebecca Durkin




The tidy galleries that you see as a visitor fail to give you a sense of how messy things can get while we’re installing. Right now our exhibition team is finishing up the installation of our two exhibits opening on Nov. 4: Vanished Kingdoms: The Wulsin Photographs of Tibet, China, and Mongolia 1921-1925 and Sacred Portraits from Tibet. The walls are painted, the framed prints are hanging up (for the most part), and we’re working on getting the labels up as well.




The Tibetan Buddhist thangkas (aka portraits) that make up the Sacred Portraits exhibit (seen in this picture) aren’t yet covered by glass. Those metal cylinders surrounding the wall panels will be the mounts for the glass. I have to admit, as much as I recognize the need to keep these fragile, old (and exquisite!) creations behind glass for protection, seeing them up close as they hang freely is pretty exciting.

There is one thangka in particular that just takes my breath away – it’s one of the largest ones there, and it has some wonderful details including rampaging elephants (note: there are no elephants in Tibet – must be an Indian influence, a neat fact I learned from the Burke collections team). But the coolest part is that the back of the thangka has been marked with the handprints of the lama who created it. Our brilliant exhibition folks figured out that this two dimensional object should be seen from the front and back to truly get the most out of it, so they built a wall with a window cut out that allows you to get a glimpse of the back of the flat wall panel. How neat is that?

The photographs in Vanished Kingdoms really surprised me. I can hardly believe that these are photographs -– they look amazingly like paintings. I think this effect comes from the fact that the lantern slides from which the images are taken were hand-tinted, and the colors sometimes feel watery and slightly off. It gives these photographs an interpretive feel, like they are an idea of what was there, rather than a documentation of what was there.

I’m looking forward to this weekend – we’ll have Dhawa Ngoche, a local thangka artist, on hand to talk about the commissioned work he created for the Sacred Portraits exhibit. The Tibetan butter tea service is also on my list of highlights for the opening event.

Event details are here.

- Rebecca