Number 4, 2014

This past week, during Glencairn Museum's annual Sacred Arts Festival, the Venerable Losang Samten worked for five days to create a traditional Tibetan sand mandala. Mandalas are an ancient art form of Tibetan Buddhism. Drawn in colored sand, they represent the world in its divine form, and serve as a map by which an ordinary human mind can be transformed into an enlightened mind. Losang, a renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar and former personal attendant to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, was born in central Tibet. He traveled to the United States in 1988 to make the first public mandala in the West, at the American Museum of Natural History. He taught Tibetan Language at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 1997, and was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002. In 2004 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Losang is now the Spiritual Director of the Chenrezig Tibetan Buddhist Center of Philadelphia. He was interviewed at Glencairn Museum on April 23, 2014.

Number 3, 2014

In the 1920s, before construction had begun on Glencairn, Raymond Pitcairn noticed two medieval bronze bells for sale in the gallery of a New York City art dealer. Unfortunately for Pitcairn, while he was deciding whether or not to buy the bells, they were purchased by William Randolph Hearst, the legendary newspaper publisher and art collector. In a remarkable turn of events, more than a decade later Mildred Pitcairn gave the bells to her husband as a Christmas present. After construction on Glencairn was complete, the bells were hung from ropes in the Great Hall, where they remain to this day.

Number 2, 2014

Raymond Pitcairn is remembered primarily for two architectural achievements: Bryn Athyn Cathedral, and Glencairn, the Bryn Athyn home he built for his family and art collection. One of Pitcairn’s other creative outlets is less well known—his lifelong interest in photography. This hobby is the focus of Glencairn Museum’s current exhibition, Behind the Lens: Raymond Pitcairn and Photography (through November 15, 2014). The Glencairn Museum Archives maintains a large collection of photographic prints and negatives, including thousands of glass negatives. The images in the exhibition have been drawn from this remarkable resource.

Number 1, 2014

Crispin Paine, Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UK), is a leading authority on the interpretation of religious objects in museums. His new book, Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties, uses examples from around the world to examine how religious objects are “transformed” when they enter museums—how they are interpreted by curators, and how visitors respond to them. Last fall, after lecturing at Yale University, Crispin traveled to Bryn Athyn to spend several days at Glencairn Museum, where he consulted with museum staff and addressed a group of Bryn Athyn College students and faculty. Glencairn staff accompanied Crispin while he toured several local museums, including the National Christmas Center & Museum and the Biblical Tabernacle Reproduction at the Mennonite Information Center. In this essay, he shares his thoughts about museums of world religion, faith museums, and religion in secular museums.

Number 10, 2013

Several weeks ago Glencairn Museum welcomed Philipp Serba from the Goethe University of Frankfurt in Germany, who is researching several Neo-Assyrian alabaster reliefs in Glencairn's Ancient Near Eastern collection. Philipp is using state-of-the-art computer technology to create a 3D-reconstruction of the wall reliefs in the Northwest Palace of Assurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.) in Nimrud, Iraq. Reliefs from this palace are located in museums and archaeological collections around the world. Glencairn has two of them, each depicting a winged, bearded figure wearing a horned helmet. In this essay, he surveys the relationship between these supernatural figures and their original positions in the Northwest Palace.

Number 9, 2013

The Way of the Cross, also known as the Stations of the Cross, is a popular form of devotion involving a series of fourteen artistic representations of events from the Passion of Jesus Christ. In the early 1950s Thorsten Sigstedt (1884-1963), a woodcarver with a home and studio on Rose Lane in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, carved the Stations of the Cross for St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Today Sigstedt's relief sculptures remain a vital part of the devotional life of St. Timothy's. This exhibition of the Stations of the Cross brings together two of the original wood-carved sculptures from St. Timothy's with twelve of Sigstedt's cast stone versions.

Number 8, 2013

In the essay below, Dr. Wendy Closterman, Associate Professor of History and Greek at Bryn Athyn College, explores the religious significance of Glencairn's Minerva-Victoria. According to Dr. Closterman, “Glencairn’s Minerva-Victoria illustrates ways that...a proliferation of divine images functioned in the Roman world. Depending on the viewer and the context, these images might evoke a variety of ideas in the minds of the people who saw them: the nature of a deity’s power, traditional tales, enduring life concepts, and connections between divine forces and human endeavors.”

Number 7, 2013

These twelfth-century marble fragments (09.SP.25a,b), on exhibit in Glencairn's Medieval Gallery, illustrate an episode from the biblical story of the Temptation of Christ. They were researched in the summer of 2012 by Dr. Julia Perratore, Glencairn’s Curatorial Fellow from the University of Pennsylvania. According to Dr. Perratore, “The devil holds a stone in his left hand, while his serpent-like tail appears to drape over his arm. In this manner, he urges the fasting Jesus to turn a stone into bread—the first of the temptations. Opposite, Jesus merely raises his right hand, a gesture typically intended to represent speech in medieval art, to indicate his reply: ‘It is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’”