Keep an eye out in your city for this exhibit. It sounds incredible…

INDIANAPOLIS. (Art Daily dot org)- The Indianapolis Museum of Art will be the first venue to host To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum, which will be on view July 13 – September 7, 2008. Featuring approximately 120 objects dating from 3600 B.C. to 400 A.D. from the world-renowned Egyptian art collection of New York’s Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will illustrate the range of strategies and preparations the ancient Egyptians developed to defeat death and to achieve success in the afterlife.

“The IMA is pleased to be the first museum in a multiple-city tour for this exhibition,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the IMA. “Through a vibrant selection of artworks from one of the world’s leading collections of Egyptian antiquities, our visitors will gain real insight into the ancient quest for survival into eternity.”

The exhibition explores the belief that death was an enemy that could be vanquished, one of the primary cultural tenets of ancient Egyptian civilization. In order to survive in the next world, Egyptians would purchase, trade, or even reuse a variety of objects—statues, coffins, vessels, and jewelry for example—that would protect them in the afterlife. The exhibition explains the process of mummification, the economics and rituals of memorials, the contents of the tomb,
the funeral accessories—including the differentiation of objects used by upper, middle, and lower classes—and the idealized afterlife.”

Exhibition highlights include:

-a vividly painted coffin of a Mayor of Thebes (about 1075-945 B.C)
-the mummy and portrait of Demetrios, a wealthy citizen of Hawara (95-100 A.D.)
-two mummies of dogs (664 B.C.-395 A.D)
-stone sculpture and statues
-protective gold jewelry made for nobility
-amulets (items for protection in the afterlife)
-canopic jars (used to store the body’s major organs)
-ceramic vessels

“Many of the objects in the show have never been exhibited before,” said Theodore Celenko, curator of African art at the IMA. “And one piece in particular—a limestone statue of a father, mother and child that’s more than 2,000 years old—will only be shown in Indianapolis.”

In addition to the exhibition, the IMA will host a lecture by the exhibition’s curator Edward Bleiberg. On Sunday, July 13 at 2 p.m., Bleiberg—the curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum—will discuss religion, aesthetics and immortality of ancient Egypt in relation to the exhibition.

Researchers open secret cave under Mexican pyramid (Yahoo News)

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Buddha’s Caves (The Daily Star)

Sand is implacable in far western China. It blows and shifts and eats away at everything, erasing boundaries, scouring graves, leaving farmers in despair.

It’s one of many threats to the major tourist draw of Dunhuang, an oasis city, on the lip of the Gobi desert: the hundreds of rock-cut Buddhist grottoes that pepper a cliff face outside town. Known as Mogaoku — “peerless caves” –and filled with paradisiacal frescos and hand-moulded clay sculptures of saviour-gods and saints, they are, in size and historical breadth, like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world.

And Mogaoku is in trouble. Thrown open to visitors in recent decades, the site has been swamped by tourists in the past few years. The caves now suffer from high levels of carbon dioxide and humidity, which are severely undermining conservation efforts. The short-term solution has been to limit the number of caves that can be visited and to admit people only on timed tours, but the deterioration continues…

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For more information and photos of the caves, click here.