Buddhist art: where to see it.
1. My husband and I go to the Rubin Museum of Himalyan Art pretty frequently. It’s free on Friday nights, has a  nice vibe, and features good films in its theatre and cool music in the low-key lounge — as well as many, many, many paintings, sculptures, and mandalas of buddhas, siddhis, arhats, deities, etc. from Nepal, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Tibet. The Rubin’s collection is amazing, and the exhibits are beautifully curated, thoughtfully presented, and art historically fascinating. I love that this museum is in the old Barney’s store, long a mecca and temple of its own, on Seventh Ave and Seventeenth Street. I’ll bet that most people would consider the Rubin a museum of buddhist art.

2. I visit the Wooster Collective a couple of times a week – almost every day, in fact.  Sara and Marc Schiller’s web site/blog is a grass-roots, downtown, collective celebration of street art, with folks sending in photos and video of brilliant street art from around the world. Illegal, witty, and impermanent, questioning who owns what and the very idea of ownership of our urban visual field, street art has always seemed to me to be an art form that often profoundly embodies buddhist themes and insights without explicitly referencing buddhist iconography.
Two of my favorite pieces featured on WC this past month include Jan Vormann’s Lego patches of ancient walls in Italy:

and Benjamin Verdonck’s Giant Nest in Rotterdam

how cool is that? Interdependent, impermanent, and not a siddhi in sight.
What’s YOUR idea of buddhist art?