3 minute read
Celebrating a partnership in education and the arts
For over a decade, Worcester State University and the Worcester Art Museum have enjoyed a mutually beneficial institutional partnership. University students, faculty, and staff enjoy free, unlimited access to WAM’s extensive art collection, spanning centuries and cultures from around the world. The Worcester Art Museum is enriched by innovative approaches and creative thinking that faculty and students bring to our programs and initiatives—and by their regular, inspiring presence in our galleries. To honor this invigorating partnership and shared commitment to an education informed by the arts, the University invited eight wellknown writers from New England and four Worcester State faculty members to share, in essays, artworks from the Museum that inspire them. Beyond the Frame: Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts, to be published in May of 2022, provides a window into our community’s spectacular art treasures— here at the Worcester Art Museum. We are pleased to share below an excerpt from “Fugitive Work,” Kirun Kapur’s essay reflecting on the 16th-century Indian work, Birth of Ghazan Khan.
Kirun Kapur grew up between Honolulu and New Delhi and her first job was for India’s groundbreaking feminist magazine, Manushi. In the United States, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner, among many other journals. Her newest book, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and included in the Best Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Her first collection, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, won the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award. Kapur teaches at Amherst College, where she is the director of creative writing.
Beyond the Frame: Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts, can be purchased for $25 in the Museum Shop, by emailing shopsales@worcesterart.org, or by calling 508.793.4355.
I visited the Birth of Ghazan Khan on a sunny day in June 2021, ten months after my father died. My father loved history. Had I visited the painting a year earlier, I would have called him: “Dad,” I’d have said, “I’m going to see a painting commissioned by the Emperor Akbar in 1596. It was painted in Lahore. Can you believe it’s here, in Massachusetts?” “Akbar?” he would have said. “You know he founded his own religion? You know there would’ve been no great Mughal art without him?” He’d have launched into a story about Akbar’s court musician Tansen, or reminded me that we’d visited Fatehpur Sikri, the city built by Akbar, where we’d leapt across the giant pachisi board, designed so the emperor could play with human pieces. I would have rolled my eyes, trying to get a word in but happy to hear him rattling off dates and facts, unwilling to tell him I already knew these stories, which he’d told me so many times. I would’ve been surprised—and not surprised—when, even in his nineties, he slipped in some new turn or tidbit, just when I thought I knew them all. And so, my father was with me, standing in the June sunlight, examining this painting. Ten months after he died, he was whispering grim facts about Mughal armies, witty tales about Akbar’s advisor Birbal. Right there, in Worcester, we were walking the streets of Lahore, turning down the narrow lanes he’d run through as a boy, just a stone’s throw from where the Birth of Ghazan Khan had been inked into life. * * * When I said the miracle was happening right now, what I meant was you are here, in the twenty-first century, looking at a painting made four centuries ago in Lahore. It was made to illustrate a book, the Jāmi al-tawārīkh (Compendium of Chronicles), which was itself created seven centuries ago in Persia, in an effort to commemorate a birth that took place some eight centuries past on the shore of the Caspian Sea. You’re crossing a lot of time zones. You’re connected to many places at once. The painting was cut from its companion pages in New York, sometime in the 1930s, coming to rest, alone, seven thousand miles from where it was fashioned. If you’re lucky enough to see the work in person, you’ll be standing in a city the painters had never heard of, in a country they couldn’t have imagined. * * * BEYOND
THE FRAME Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts
ADJUST BACKGROUND GREEN TO BE A LITTLE
MOREYELLOW
BEYOND
THE FRAME Celebrating a Partnership in Public Education and the Arts
