From appliquè to embroidery, watercolor to collage, follow the journey of different textiles and how they are transformed in the hands of an artist.

Discover the interconnection between art and fabrics through the work of Michela Martello, Livia Liverani and Nyima Dhondup.

The first exhibition of Tibetan thangka and appliqué masters Terris and Leslie Nguyen Temple

Tibetan thangka and appliqué artists Terris and Leslie Nguyen Temple join us for two weeks in October, exploring their work and passion for the natural world through an inaugural exhibition, workshops, and screenings of a captivating documentary about the creation of giant silk appliqué thangkas in Tibet.

A Discussion on Art

We are delighted to host Tülku Jamyang as he reflects on the inspiration behind his intricate incense-burned artwork. A reincarnation and artist, “TJ” strives to reproduce his meditative introspection in his artwork, and the result is a style that is passionate and inquisitive. His artistic method involves rice paper and incense, burning intricate holes in a pointillist style to create a vivid, detailed work.

Join thangka master Karma Sichoe as he teaches a class how to paint the perfect lotus using traditional mineral pigments. Learn to mix these pigments to generate vibrant colors and discover how this technique has influenced Tibetan art. Karma Sichoe’s training in both traditional and contemporary art reveals a talent for connecting historical practices to modern art applications. Finally, you’ll learn to paint a traditional lotus and leave with your own artwork that would be great to put on a wall or give to a loved one!

Little known to the outside world, the Land of Snows is seeing a craze for minerals as wild and desperate as the gold rush was in the United States 150 years ago. Voices of the Stone follows two entrepreneurs as they attempt to enter the mining market, and the various paths and choices they face. The film is set against the vast and majestic landscape of northern Tibet—its fauna, its herdsmen, their customs and the struggle for survival; the pilgrims and the small anecdotes of daily life—these are shown in slow motion as one of planet Earth’s ultimate primeval environments.

Located just forty kilometers from Nepal, the town of Nyanang (also known as Nyalam) in southern Tibet has served as a historic, important site on the cross-border trade route between Tibet and Nepal. A native of Nyanang, Rinchen Dharlo draws from his exhaustive research on Nyanang to present an introduction to the region, its historic sites, including Milarepa’s meditation cave, and its unique people, culture, and traditions.

Join us for the second event of Transcending Tibet: A Preview, a roundtable discussion with contemporary Tibetan art scholar Leigh Miller and the artists, followed by a special extended opening of the gallery. Traveling from Nepal, Italy, Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Queens, these artists will speak on everything from their unconventional choices of materials (silkscreen appliqué collage, incense-burned rice paper, monastic robes, and much more) to negotiating Tibet's rich legacy of traditional art and a fast-changing world.

Miss Nowhere to Call Home last week at MoMA?

By popular demand, we will be screening the film at Trace Foundation. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the director, Jocelyn Ford. 

Join us for a talk by Dr. Nida Chenaktsang on sexuality in Tibetan medicine, and the role of sex for energy and health. Dr. Nida will also look at Buddhist views on sexuality, as well as the historical masters and texts that cover this subject, including the Kamasutra and karmamudra.

Gendun Chopel: one of the most important Tibetan figures of the twentieth century, famous for his skills as a poet and infamous for his controversial views. But he was more than that: He was also a talented artist.

From “hungry ghosts” (yidag)—spirits with tiny throats and huge insatiable stomachs—to exorcism festivals, ghost dances, and spirit traps, Tibet lays claim to one one of the world’s richest . . . and spookiest traditions of ghosts. To showcase the richness of Tibetan ghost stories and to celebrate Halloween, we invited you to send us your scariest, most hair-raising entries for a Tibetan ghost story competition.

In central Tibetan areas, tromdu (ཁྲོམ་དུས།) is the annual market day—a unique chance for nomads, artisans, and farmers to journey from villages across the region, pitch tents, and exchange their crafts, food, and products—sometimes for money, often for other goods.

As we make room for new books for our library, we're delighted to invite you to come out for our own tromdu. We will be giving away and selling at deep discounts:

Professor Khangkar Tsultrim Kelsang visits from Kyoto to discuss the different views of Madhyamaka philosophy as presented in Tsongkhapa’s fifteenth-century classic The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo), and in twentieth-century scholar Gendun Chopel’s Adornment for Nagarjuna’s Thought (Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan).

Suggested donation $10. Students $5.

Back by popular demand, world-renowned Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden introduces his picks for the most outstanding short films by up-and-coming student filmmakers from the Tibetan Plateau. A short discussion and Q&A will follow. Suggested donation $10.

Photographer Laurent Zylberman and writer Eric Meyer were the first independent journalists to travel to the Tibet Autonomous Region in the fall of 2008. Over the course of their fifteen-day trip through Lhasa, Gyantse, and Shikatse, Zylberman captured powerful images of a society in transition.

Join us as critically-acclaimed director Pema Tseden (Silent Holy Stones, The Search, Old Dog) discusses literature and film with Tibetan language and literature professor Françoise Robin (INALCO, Paris) and Modern Tibetan Studies professor and film expert Robbie Barnett (Columbia University). This event is the first of a series talks on Tibetan films with Pema Tseden in 2012. Pema Tseden’s award-winning films have been featured in film festivals around the world, and have received acclaim for their nuanced and sensitive portrayals of contemporary life in Tibet.

In Tibet, especially in the city of Lhasa, the arrival of autumn signals the beginning of kite-flying season. Enjoyed by all ages, kite flying can be a pleasant pastime or a fierce competition where flyers coat their string with crushed glass in order to cut down other kites in a kind of midair battle.

Join us as we explore this hobby enjoyed by many across the Tibetan Plateau, and learn how to make your own Tibetan kite.

The grasslands are changing. Across the Tibetan Plateau, desertification, biodiversity loss, and ecological relocations are dramatically altering the landscape and reshaping Tibetan society. What’s happening on the grasslands today poses unprecedented challenges to Tibetan communities and will have a profound impact on them far into the future.

Join us on Friday and Saturday, May 20 and 21, for the first event in our second lecture series, Visions of Development, as we explore the state of the plateau’s grasslands, and it’s bearing upon the future of Tibetan communities.

Join us as we celebrate Losar 2011 with an evening of traditional Tibetan music and food and an exhibition of New Year's offerings from across the Plateau.

Celebrate the month of love at The Fat of My Heart at Trace Foundation. Join us Friday, February 11, for an exploration of expressions of love and desire in Tibetan literature, historical documents, and song. Special guests will present the sweetest of love stories, real and fictional, songs of love and heartbreak, and love letters and the rules for their composition. The evening will culminate in a love letter writing competition (please see rules for submission below) where the audience will vote for their favorite.

In his talk, the library’s first to focus on Sikkim, scholar Kalzang Bhutia will provide an overview of the work and philosophy of exponents of Sikkimese language and literary reform over the past thirty years. The talk will particularly focus on seminal figures such as Pema Rinzin Tagchungdarpa, Tashi Pelkyi Penpo, Norden Tsering, and Bhaichung Tsichudarpo, and on how they have reinvigorated Sikkimese language, as well as adapted traditional approaches to Sikkimese education, during the process of developing Sikkimese language in the Indian state education system.

Each language is a unique key to a community’s worldview and culture and plays a central role in transmitting historically developed knowledge about specific, biologically diverse environments. There is an increasing awareness and recognition of linguistic, cultural, and biodiversity as inter-related and mutually supportive aspects of the diversity of life. As such, the crises affecting these aspects—from biological extinction to disappearing languages—appear to converge and even drive each other on.

Since the establishment of the Tibetan language’s written form in the seventh century, there have been arguments and debate for reform and innovation. In recent times, one proposal that has generated a considerable amount of discussion has focused on the use of punctuation and spacing in Tibetan. It has been argued that it is difficult to recognize words in a system where punctuation is used only between syllables and sentences or phrases, and this is prohibitive to learning.

Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) was, arguably, the most important—and certainly the most controversial—Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant philosopher, a superb poet, and the first Tibetan to paint in a “modern style.” This lecture will survey his fascinating career (he wrote the first sex manual in Tibetan and was imprisoned for this political views) and present some of his watercolors from his travels to India and Sri Lanka in the 1930s.

For nearly thirty years Drangchar ("A Light Rain") has been one of the premier Tibetan literary journals. Established in 1981, it was one of the first journals devoted to literature written in the Tibetan language. Over the years it has become an essential Tibetan language literary resource—featuring influential Tibetan writers and poets, literary theory pieces, and artwork—and has inspired countless literary and artistic endeavors.

Jetsün Kushok Chimey Luding was born into the prestigious Sakya Khön family, which was established in the eleventh century by Khön Könchok Gyelpo. In the Sakya Khön family, the daughters are known as Jetsünmas and have an important role as religious practitioners and teachers. Until she was twenty-one years old, she lived in the Sakya Khön Dolma Palace in Sakya, and left Tibet for India in 1959. Presently she resides in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, with her family but as a popular lama, she travels all over the world to give teachings.

Scholar and writer Tseten Dorje will present his research on the culture, customs and cuisine of eleventh-century Tsongkha, an extensive region in contemporary Qinghai Province. This culturally diverse region, situated at the confluence of Tibetan, Mongolian, Turkic and Han cultures, is generally considered to have included modern-day Xining, Kumbum, Datong, Drotsang, and Kokonor. The region is the birthplace and namesake of Je Tsongkhapa, the founder of Ganden Monastery near Lhasa, and the Gelukpa School of Tibetan Buddhism.

Latse Library unveils a unique collection of Tibetan stamps and correspondence from the first half of the twentieth century. Over one hundred items from three collections will be presented together to showcase the breadth and depth of Tibetan letter writing in the period—from postage, to rules of composition, to the personal relationships captured in these unique letters. The premiere will include talks by experts in Tibetan culture and philately and will be followed by a reception.

This talk will explore the importance of medicine in Tibetan cultural history, and the ways in which it drew on Buddhist ideas but also was frequently at odds with the aims of Buddhism. It will also examine the implications of medicine for the Tibetan Buddhist state, especially during the heyday of the Fifth Dalai Lama and his regent Desi Sangye Gyatso. In some ways the interaction between the fortunes of medicine and Buddhism in Tibet was not unlike that between religion and science in early modern Europe, but in other ways the differences are striking.

Join us for a talk by Yumpa, Director and Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Tibetan Astro-science and Traditional Tibetan Medicine, or the Mentsikhang, in Lhasa. Mr. Yumpa will discuss the role Tibetan astrology plays in a changing society, as well as the challenges this traditional discipline faces in the digital age.

YUMPA

secretary general

Tibetan Astro-science Association of the Tibet Autonomous Region

Trace Foundation celebrates the release of the much-anticipated History of Amdo by author and scholar Hortsang Jigme. This six-volume work is the result of nine years of careful research by the author, and covers this whole history of the Amdo region, from the first appearance of inhabitants to the 1950s. Each area of the region is examined, and within each region the forts, monasteries, temples, and individuals that comprise the rich fabric of Amdo.

Join us for talks by leading experts on bilingual education, Jamyang Tashi and Trowo Gyaltsen, as they share their views on the current practices and possible directions for the development of Tibetan language in education.

TROWO GYALTSEN

senior lecturer

Barkham Nationalities Normal School, Ngawa Prefecture, Sichuan Province