Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

This exhibition presents an international survey of Buddhism and Buddhist art, beginning with the religion’s origins in India and following its spread through mainland and island Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and East Asia. Incorporating 150 masterpieces of pan-Asian Buddhist art, the exhibition introduces key concepts of Buddhist thought and practice viewed through rare and extraordinarily beautiful Buddhist sculptures, paintings, and ritual objects. Drawn from LACMA’s permanent collection, with several significant loans from private collections, the exhibition explores the life of the Buddha, the role of the bodhisattva, Buddhist cosmology, and key concepts such as dharma, karma, nirvana, mantra, mudra, and mandala.

As part of the forced incarceration of over 125,000 American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, filmmaker Emiko Omori explores her family’s experience at the Poston American concentration camp. Fifty years later, she and other former inmates reflect on the personal and political consequences of the camps, offering a poetic and illuminating view of a troubling chapter in American history.

In an afternoon organized by the Asian American Pacific Islander Arts Network, ARTNOIR, and The Here And There Collective, artists, art historians, and curators discuss the ways that their identity shapes their lives and creative practices. Panelists address how artists of various diasporas navigate existing systems and band together for cultural code switching, when excluded from the art market.