Join us for the Templeton Lecture in Art History
Friday, January 9, 2015 from 6:00-7:30
Nelson Art Gallery, UC Davis
Free and open to the public

The Kailasanatha temple complex is perhaps the oldest surviving monument in the city full of temples that is Kanchipuram, or Kanchi, in southeastern India. This monument looks like it has hardly changed at all since several members of the Pallava royal dynasty patronized its construction around the year 700 AD. No one has since encircled this exquisitely beautiful complex in the many courtyards, high walls and tall gateways that mark the most famous ancient temples of the south as objects of continued devotion. Its sculptures preserve very early iconographic forms.  Its eighth-century inscriptions are written in archaic alphabets. 

Padma Kaimal trained in the History of Indian Art under Joanna Williams at the University of California, Berkeley. She has taught at Colgate University since 1988. Her research questions common assumptions about art from the Tamil region. Did kings build the only architecture that matters? Did men? Are the boundaries of India’s modern states meaningful for understanding tenth-century architecture? How do narrative sculptures tell their stories? Are fierce goddesses demonic? Are museums the problem, the solution, or both to contentions over cultural property? Her book, Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Ann Arbor: Association of Asian Studies, 2012) seeks to disrupt categories of East and West, victim and thief, as it traces the worship, ruination, dispersal, and re-enshrinement of nineteen sculptures from a tenth-century goddess temple. Her essays have appeared in Third Text, Source, The Art Bulletin, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Artibus Asiae, Archives of Asian Art, and Ars Orientalis. Fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, the American Association of University Women, and the Center for South Asian Studies at U. C. Berkeley have supported her research.

This lecture is sponsored by the Alan Templeton Endowment for Art History in the Department of Art and Art History, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Departments of Comparative Literature, History and Religious Studies, the Program in Middle East/South Asian Studies, and the Graduate Group in the Study of Religion.

For additional information, please contact avenkatesan@ucdavis.edu