[INTERVIEW]
A Museum Without Walls
We sat down with Jorrit Britschgi, the Executive Director of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, to discuss the museum’s bold decision to close its physical space in New York in favor of a decentralized model focused on global partnerships and digital engagement. From addressing the spiritual potential of museum spaces to navigating complex issues of restitution and cultural representation, Britschgi shares how the Rubin is reimagining what it means to be a museum in the 21st century—one rooted in empathy, participation, and global dialogue.
The Rubin Museum has recently announced that it was closing the doors to its physical location in New York, instead focusing on pop-up locations and an online presence. Could you tell us more about what led you to this change?
The Rubin has taken a wide perspective on the cultural sector and the needs of society as we see it developing, and has formulated an institutional plan that is radically different from what one would expect from a traditional brick and mortar museum approach. And while our mission as an organization doesn't really change, it's about how we go about it that does. So our set of strategies are vastly different from an organization that mostly aims to deliver content to people who visit the space. We're really thinking about a decentralized way of operating where, through partnerships and a focus on developing digital resources, we can share our work much more globally.
In that sense, it's a vastly different way of going about our institutional work. But in many ways, it's still a very traditional museum approach, insofar as we're working around the collection of objects, which we are continuing to share with the public. And the content that we create around this object is disseminated in many different ways.
Rubin Museum’s Mandala Lab, presented as part of the London Design Festival 2023. Photo by Ed Reeve, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art / London Design Festival
Can you talk about the pop-up exhibitions?
We have been asking ourselves certain questions: What are people driven by? What are they interested in? Where in the world, geographically, are people who may be interested in our work? And how can we, as an organization, most impactfully use our limited resources?
There are built-in barriers for many people to go to places that we may call museums today. So by going to different places, and also public places, we've been able to reach people that may not entertain the thought of regularly going to a museum on weekends. It has really allowed us to serve a much wider public than we would be able to if we just focused our efforts on a brick and mortar museum building. So this work is with and for communities.
To name one example, we supported the creation of the inaugural Nepalese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale a couple of years ago. This is not typically work for a museum to be associated with, but our mission is to share Himalayan art with the world. So we went to a place where there's a lot of people interested in art and also many tourists, and worked with an artist from Nepal to represent their country.
Rubin Museum’s Mandala Lab, Bilbao 2022. Photo by Javier de Paz Garcia, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.
As we understand the new ecological, cultural and social issues facing us today, what do you think the world needs to learn from Himalayan cultures?
At the very core of a museum, there is a moment of education and learning, a moment of cultural literacy. Oftentimes, objects from different places around the world are a doorway into a different cultural sphere, into different ways of thinking about humanity. So anything that opens that door is beneficial for audiences because it allows them to ponder on their own perspectives as they relate to some of the Himalayan traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism, which offer significantly different ways of thinking around how the mind works and what reality looks like. These are all things that I find really interesting in showing people that there are different ways to respond to universal human challenges.
Visitors take part in an exhibition activity. Photo by Filip Wolak, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art
Can you tell us about the interactive exhibits?
Audience participation has always been a very strong angle that the Rubin has pursued. We’ve gone beyond simply looking by inviting people, in some instances, to write something down, to draw something in the sand, to enter an intention into a prayer. The idea is to go beyond the purely intellectual aesthetic approach in order to more deeply register our content with visitors. The more senses something touches, the more likely it is to stay in your memory as a moment of encountering art. We try to employ this technique whenever possible.
Rubin Museum’s Gateway to Himalayan Art at Lehigh University Art Galleries, 2023. Photo by Ryan Hulvat, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art
A few years ago, there was an exhibition focused on death. It’s quite interesting for a museum to ask visitors deeply existential questions and to put them in a mindset where they are coming not so much to consume, but to relieve some sort of existential doubt.
That exhibition was called Remember That You Will Die And a more recent one was Death Is Not the End Topics like death and rebirth are big topics for humanity that many traditions have something interesting to say about. And oftentimes for us, our work is to to bring out how Tibetan Buddhism, for example, thinks about this idea of afterlife and rebirth and the time in between.
Many museums have recently been facing calls for restitution of works. There have also been challenges made about relying too heavily on more traditional, Western-centric narratives. Has the Rubin faced similar challenges? If so, how have you responded to them?
The questions of provenance are at the foreground of our institutional work. It's a very tricky, complicated topic that museums are really dealing with. And I believe one of the challenges has been the nuances of how an object leaves a place, passes through many different hands, and then eventually, maybe hundreds of years later, ends up in a museum. This story is oftentimes very complicated and not clear cut. And we've had instances where we've discovered or have been alerted to objects in our collection that turned out to be stolen. Of course, nobody wants stolen objects in their collection, so there's a process of gathering information, evidence, and then deaccessioning. And this, I believe, is ongoing work that can never be finished in some ways.
We also have to understand the complexity of some of the history. If an artist from Nepal is commissioned to do a work in a monastery in Tibet and this work eventually ends up in India and then travels elsewhere, the question of who owns the rights to that piece of art becomes a very tricky and complicated question. I believe as organizations, we can do a much better job in working directly with members of the local communities in the local regions, or in the diasporas. To give you an example, we had repatriation of an object that unfortunately turned out to be stolen at some point from a monastery in Nepal. When we were about to return the object, we contacted the monastery and asked if a collaboration was possible, and they said; “Well, in fact, we've been wanting to open a museum for 20 years, can you lend us expertise?” And we entered an exchange with them on how we would go about opening a museum, how to tell stories of objects, and also provided some funding. That, for me, was a very beautiful outcome of the repatriation process.
Installation view of the Pavilion of Nepal at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Photo: Riccardo Tosetto, courtesy of Tsherin Sherpa and Rossi & Rossi
What's the thought process that goes into curating an exhibition for an audience based in New York? How do you make sense of the East-West dichotomy and how do you prepare exhibitions for a “western” audience?
A lot of the art that we put on display has a religious background, or is rooted in a religious tradition. By definition, museums are secular spaces. So our task really is to use the objects in a very respectful, informed manner, and to share cultural knowledge around these objects that goes beyond the object clearly acquired, who made it and why, who commissioned it, and how it was used in a religious practice. I believe going about this work with integrity, by being informed by the tradition itself, and doing it respectfully is essential.
Let’s talk about museums as places that host people. Spirituality is an aspect of hospitality that is not usually referred to, but in certain areas of the Rubin (such as the temple), we feel truly hosted within a spiritual experience.
Absolutely. You're referring to the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room, which is a museum version of what a wealthy Tibetan household would have at home. And it's fascinating to see how people utilize that space: a chapel, a space of contemplation and reflection, among others. But we are not telling the audience that they are entering a sacred space. Rather, it's contextualized as a public shrine room. We can't be prescriptive around what people will experience; we're simply creating a framework of how we present our work, but how people experience it is going to be vastly different according to what they're interested in, or what they see when they encounter art.
The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room. Photo by Dave De Armas, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art.
What are your thoughts on how you see the virtual realm as being a way of reaching wider audiences, especially when there are spiritual dimensions to the work? How do you see that playing out in the next decade or so?
Our past digital strategies have been fairly traditional. Our future digital strategy is informed by this idea that we can serve a much wider and geographically more diverse audience than we could ever reach by asking people to visit us in a given space. We're putting much more thought and more resources into producing content for the digital domains. We’re asking ourselves: How can we lay our digital content around the objects in a way that will be of relevance for the next 5, 10, 15 years? And one of the big questions we have is: How do we create a virtual community around an organization? I’m also trying to answer the question: How can we use digital to open the door that will allow people to have an authentic experience of a place they may never be able to travel to?
“Our future digital strategy is informed by this idea that we can serve a much wider and geographically more diverse audience than we could ever reach by asking people to visit us in a given space. We're putting much more thought and more resources into producing content for the digital domains.”
— Jorrit Britschgi
Jorrit Britschgi is Executive Director of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. An art historian with a Ph.D. in East Asian Art History from Zurich University, he previously led exhibitions and publications at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Since joining the Rubin in 2016, Britschgi has expanded its global and digital reach while deepening its focus on Himalayan and South Asian art. He also serves as publisher of Artibus Asiae, a leading journal in Asian art and archaeology.