The Munson-Williams Proctor Art Institute in Utica, NY is jointly housed in a 1960 Phillip Johnson building and a 1850 Italianate mansion and features more than 25,000 American, Asian & European art objects (including works by Copley, Dali, Frankenthaler, Gorky, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picasso, Pollock, Rothenberg, Rothko, Stella, Warhol, & Whistler).
On Saturday mornings, the museum hosts yoga in the galleries, it’s called Art and Yoga: For Mind, Body and Spirit.
According to their website:
Art and Yoga takes place in a variety of the museum’s galleries. Each session begins with a 15-minute introduction to a work of art by Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Mary E. Murray, followed by one hour of yoga and meditation led by certified yoga instructor, Barbara Hays Klein.
I can’t imagine a better way to start off the weekend and I sure hope some of those classes are in the same room as their awesome “No.18” (1951) by Mark Rothko.
What do you think the chances are of convincing MoMA to let a yoga instructor lead a class in a room full of Pollocks? Or how about by the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum?
Turns out there are yoga classes in many museums, including in the Asian galleries of the Ackland Museum at the Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, by the statue of 600 year old Chinese Buddhist Goddess of Mercy at the Baltimore Museum of Art, in the Asian galleries of the Walters Art Gallery (pictured below via Flickr) and in the atmospheric galleries of UPenn’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Earlier this month, artist Leslie Dill, who is showing at the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, TN, took it one step further and according to the Hunter website, she asked her audience to respond to her work through yoga:
…[she] is very interested in Eastern thought, meditation and the power of words…Join us for a unique yoga experience in the gallery as her works speak to us and as we respond through yoga.
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