View of Tibetan shrine room from the Alice S. Kandell Collection at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Asian Art, screenshot from 3D image by John Bigelow Taylor (2017). 
Shrine for the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Alice S. Kandell Collection, image by John Bigelow Taylor.
Tibetan Buddhist art collector Alice S. Kandell has donated more than 200 objects dating from the 14th to the 20th C, forming a complete Tibetan shrine room, to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the MIA. The shrine room, which she constructed in her home in New York over the last two decades, will now complement other major collections of Asian art at the MIA.
Minneapolis is a very diverse city and has the U.S.’s second largest Tibetan population after New York. The shrine room will enable all the city’s residents as well as students and scholars to become familiar with Tibetan culture and the larger world of Buddhist thought.
The MIA shrine room will follow the configuration of a traditional Tibetan Buddhist shrine, similar to one already established from the Kandell collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA). In 2011, Dr. Kandell gave the NMAA several hundred objects that were first exhibited as, “In the Realm of the Buddha: The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine of Alice S. Kandell.” This exhibit became the most popular in the museum’s history. The Dalai Lama attended the announcement of the gift, and told Kandell:
“Your intention is very good. Showing Tibetan art and providing an explanation is important. People will gain a deeper understanding of the Buddha and a way of thinking that is very much based on peace and compassion.”
The Rubin Museum in New York has also assembled a superb shrine room, which provides a unique place for peaceful contemplation in the busy city.
Dr. Kandell has been a collector of Buddhist art since she skipped her exams at Harvard – with the blessing of her professor- to go to Sikkim in 1965 for the wedding of her friend Hope Cooke to Sikkim’s Crown Prince Palden Thondup Namgyal.
Dr. Kandell developed a passionate interest in the living Buddhist culture of the region, traveling many times to Sikkim, both before and after the independent kingdom’s annexation by India in 1975. Her photographs and slides, made during visits between 1965 and 1979 (primarily 1965-1971) were donated to the Library of Congress in 2010. A selection of these photographs may be seen and enlarged from the grid below.
