Lord Ganesha and other deities are on display at an exhibition at San Francisco airport in the United States.
The exhbition, which opened this month will be on display till February 2013 and features Hindu sculptures borrowed from the collections of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.
These are profound expressions of veneration from the world’s oldest living religion, says the exhibition page on SFO Museum website.
These scriptures date back to the seventh and eight centuries when they were carved from stone on temple walls or rendered from wooden sculptures made more than one thousand years later for use in religious processions.
“Sculpture is an essential part of Indian civilization; a culture that dates back to ancient times and has flourished uninterrupted to the present,” says the exhibition page. “It is fundamentally important to India’s nearly one billion Hindu adherents.”
Many cave temples in India date back to the third to seventh century, and preserve the history of Indian sculptures, many of which were carved with bare hands and stand testimony to the devotion of the carvers. Most of these sculptures took a lifetime to produce and have stood the test of time.
The historic monuments in the southern part of India were developed around the seventh and ninth century and represent the dynasties of the Pallavas and the Pandyas.
Outside India, Indian art and sculptures are preserved in the British Museum, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Praising SFO Museum for exhibiting Hinduism focused artifacts, Rajan Zed, President of Universal Society of Hinduism, said that art had a long and rich tradition in Hinduism and ancient Sanskrit literature talked about religious paintings of deities on wood or cloth.
Rajan urged major art museums of the world to frequently organize Hindu art focused exhibitions, thus sharing the rich Hindu art heritage with the rest of the world.
Created in 1980, SFO Museum was the first cultural institution of its kind located in an international airport. Â Every year, the museum attracts many of the 40 million passengers who use the airport. The exhibitions are an established tradition enjoyed by frequent visitors from the San Francisco Bay Area and travelers from all over the world.
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