Crow 31 Days: A Chamber of Leaders

The Crow Collection is celebrating Asian-American Pacific Islander Month in May with daily writings honoring the tremendous leaders who bring our city the very best Asian Art and Culture.

This post is dedicated to the devoted members of the Steering Committee for Dallas' Asian Festival.

The Asian Festival has been a flourishing example of Asian Culture in our city for almost 25 years. The festival is produced by the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce: a band of bright and enterprising volunteers and staff. For a small paid staff and two dozen or so board members and community leaders, the festival is an extraordinary accomplishment.

Over the years, the location for the festival and the scale have changed, but the spirit and energy of this beautiful cultural offering has not. The festival is a place to experience the best of Asia in Dallas. Here are a few gateways:

1) The Food: Vendors and Food Trucks from all over the city create a delectable taste of Asia: if you stay long enough you can experience lunch and dinner. Try something you haven't had before --and wash it down with a bubble tea!

2) The Stage: Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of the festival to coordinate, the Main Stage is the place where it all happens. City Leaders gather first, with the Chinese Lions, and herald the beginning of the festival. From that point forward, it is a landscape for presenting the best Asian dance, music and cultural performances our city has to offer.

3) The Children's Fair: Museums and cultural organizations partner with the Chamber to provide the active aspect of the Festival's interactive component. Families can enjoy art projects and experiences illuminating Asian Art and Culture. This is the place your kids are sure to laugh, smile, make and remember.

4) Go Global: In recent years, the Festival leaders launched the Cultural Pavilions: larger booths teaching Festival-goers authentic relevance about one of the 26 countries represented by the Asian Chamber. Organizers share aspects of geography, tourism and culture and bring it to life. When was the last time you had the opportunity to learn about Sri Lanka? (And did you know they just expanded into Texas in August of last year with the appointment of an Honorary Consul?). Our community is changing and growing by the minute: the more you know, the more you can connect.

I've been attending the Asian Festival since the museum first participated in 1999. We'll be back this year with a Booth out at Fair Park. One highlight from those early engagements with the museum was the year the Japan America Society presented the large Koi Fish Ponds in the former location of Annette Strauss Artist's Square. We had to shade the ponds so the fish didn't get too hot. Every year offers some wonderful surprise--that year it was Koi!

I applaud our friends at the Chamber for growing the festival and staying true through all these years to a city-critical mission of cultural access and impact for every visitor. I always learn something, I always see old friends and make new ones, and I always leave proud of my Dallas: a place where culture blooms.

Make your plans to be part of our International Dallas--it can't happen without you. The Asian Festival is this Saturday, May 13 from 11-7 at Fair Park just beyond the DART stop. Bravo to the Asian Chamber for this vital contribution to our city. Your involvement can be the perfect compliment to this tremendous effort. 

Crow 31 Days: Billy Collins and the Art of Chinese Landscape Painting

Continuing the journey of 31 Days of Asia honoring Asian-American Pacific Islander Heritage Month at the Crow Collection of Asian Art, I pause for a poetry moment. Journey into the art of the pen with me.

I fell in love with poems by Billy Collins' poetry before I knew of this little gem:

Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of their Titles

Related Poem Content Details

BY BILLY COLLINS

It seems these poets have nothing

up their ample sleeves

they turn over so many cards so early,

telling us before the first line

whether it is wet or dry,

night or day, the season the man is standing in,

even how much he has had to drink.

Maybe it is autumn and he is looking at a sparrow.

Maybe it is snowing on a town with a beautiful name.

"Viewing Peonies at the Temple of Good Fortune

on a Cloudy Afternoon" is one of Sun Tung Po's.

"Dipping Water from the River and Simmering Tea"

is another one, or just

"On a Boat, Awake at Night."

And Lu Yu takes the simple rice cake with

"In a Boat on a Summer Evening

I Heard the Cry of a Waterbird.

It Was Very Sad and Seemed To Be Saying

My Woman Is Cruel—Moved, I Wrote This Poem."

There is no iron turnstile to push against here

as with headings like "Vortex on a String,"

"The Horn of Neurosis," or whatever.

No confusingly inscribed welcome mat to puzzle over.

Instead, "I Walk Out on a Summer Morning

to the Sound of Birds and a Waterfall"

is a beaded curtain brushing over my shoulders.

And "Ten Days of Spring Rain Have Kept Me Indoors"

is a servant who shows me into the room

where a poet with a thin beard

is sitting on a mat with a jug of wine

whispering something about clouds and cold wind,

about sickness and the loss of friends.

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,

to sit down in a corner,

cross my legs like his, and listen.

Crow 31 Days: Day Five: Arjuna's Dilemma

Bhagavad Gita. Solidly one of India's greatest gifts to the world. A tome of prose, moral lessons and journey written between the sixth and fifth centuries before the common era. Last night the Dallas Opera presented Arjuna's Dilemma: a capture of the struggle of conscience and consciousness between Arjuna and Krishna, beloved Hindu cowherd. 

This 2017 production promised a synthesis of Indian narrative fused with classical, jazz, chamber and musical Indian traditions against a dramatic projection. Because that's life, right? Not purely one sense or another--a melding of perspectives and experiences. Asia isn't the place we used to turn to on the other side of the topographical globe: Asia is everywhere. 

Arjuna's Dilemma synthesized these art forms breathlessly: tabla met saxophone, choirister met chanter, and a new form of sound drifted with precedence across the Winspear Opera House. The choristers, as Krishna, held the story together in tandem with Arjuna: meditative video projections a canopy to our experience. It was arresting, calming, intoxicating all at once. 

Bravos to the Dallas Opera for presenting this modern-day tableaux of ancient wisdom: the perils of conflict, consciousness, the inner war to do the right thing. Messages of the Gita's sensible wisdom were projected across clouds and graphic. slow images of water and rice falling, as if to mirror the simplicity of taking all the chaos away. 

Prior to the performance at a reception honoring the collaboration between the opera and our museum I shared an excerpt from the Bhagavad Gita translated by Eknath Easwaran in one of my most cherished books: God Makes the Rivers to Flow: 

The bhagavad gita 

What Is Real Never Ceases 

The Self dwells in the house of the body,
Which passes through childhood, youth, and old age.
So passes the Self at the time of death
Into another body. The wise know this truth
And are not deceived by it.

When the senses come in contact with sense-objects
They give rise to feelings of heat and cold,
Pleasure and pain, which come and go.
Accept them calmly, as do the wise.

The wise, who live free from pleasure and pain,
Are worthy of immortality.

What is real never ceases to be.
The unreal never is. The sages
Who realize the Self know the secret
Of what is and what is not.

Know that the Self, the ground of existence,
Can never be destroyed or diminished.
For the changeless cannot be changed.

Bodies die, not the Self that dwells therein.
Know the Self to be beyond change and death.
Therefore strive to realize this Self.

+++

And so the wisdom in this exploration of thirty-one days of Asia is to seek the wisdom: seek the things the sages saw and shared. Look into the opportunity to learn about a culture less familiar than our own. It is the looking that, as Krishna teaches, will reveal our better selves. 

Crow 31 Days: What Asian Art History Taught Me About Prayer

May is Asian-American Pacific Islander Month, and for thirty-one days I am chronicling the stories of places, people and experiences that frame my personal inquiry into the Asian-American experience. Today this inquiry looks into the practice of prayer.

Five Crow Collection staff members, all part of our newly formed Happiness Committee, joined the union of interfaith leaders, city leaders, congregants and seekers at Eddie Dean's Ranch in Downtown Dallas. We are Texas, after all, and the best unions happen best here over a bold spread of BBQ and cole slaw.

The picnic-style atmosphere humanized us all. Everyone loves a picnic. Everyone loves having a go-to place to pray or meditate--with God or god or simply The Great Mystery. This relationship to prayer brought us together today: Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and those without a belief in God. In prayer, all were welcome.

What has a study of Asian Art and Art History taught me about prayer?

1. It Takes Time: Our collection, by culture and nature is contemplative. Studying the sculptural, gestural forms of a Buddha takes time, and takes you from the constraints and structures of time. Images of the Buddha are generally calm, perfectly symmetrical, a balanced landscape of lowered eyes, cheek, ear, garment, hands, and feet in the lotus pose. The Buddha, so rooted in his own capacity for calm and reflection, brings the viewer just that. Looking at a Buddha or Vishnu or Agni, is a place to pause, be quiet and just be. Time stands still.

2. The Art of Practice: Ideas become intentions, intentions become promises, promises become action, and the repeated action become ritual and ritual builds a practice. This aspect of praying and being is in all religions, but my study of mindfulness and meditation (based in Buddhist traditions) has revealed the hard work of intention. Intention leads to existence, and existence makes it real. This realness, this "being" in the world leads to becoming, transforming.  It happens because we, the human, say it is so, every moment we chose to create a mantra, a moment a prayer.

3. Namaste: I see the light in you and you see the light in me. This is the language of the sanskrit word namaste. My inquiry into the cultures and histories of Asia taught me of the deep compassion asked of us in prayer. By knowing more about the devotional practices of a Tibetan Monk (mandala), A Hindu Priest (pooja) and a Muslim Imam (evening prayers) I've become more aware of my own prayer practices: how prayer manifests, how we bless a space and how we close the day. As a cradle Episcopalian, I am versed in the rigors of the Book of Common Prayer and an Episcopalian made stronger from my journey learning about other religions.

4. One God/god: As human beings we really are all just the same: the same human born to our first teacher of compassion: our mothers. We have needs and desires for self but we also have needs and desires (both innate and learned) to relieve the human we see of their suffering. We have the capacity to be cruel and we have the capacity to love. We get to make the conscious choice of compassion. Scholars like Karen Armstrong believe it is compassion and the altruistic wish to do unto others as you would have them do unto you is our most unifying principle as humans. Art and spirituality invite us in.

5. Pray from the Future: I have the capacity to pray and meditate from the future I want to be inside of. The lessons of meditation reveal reflection and quiet. Reflection and quiet reveal the space for joy, happiness and possibility. That prayer, for that future, puts me there: in a future that is possible, joyful, true. When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, I prayed (a lot) for healing. I prayed for peace in the dark spaces of waiting for test results. I prayed the radiation treatment was going to Every. Last. Cell. I was in that future, prayerfully and wholly. I was healed.

It's not easy--it takes hard, intentional work to slow down and be quiet, and I am just a beginner in this world of seeing something new. But it's all there: the places to be quiet (churches, museums, nature); the body to still and the mind to calm. And it's all up to us.

Crow 31 Days: Krishna, The Cowherd at Home in a Former Catholic Church in East Dallas

You've seen the bell towers from I-30 driving into Downtown Dallas just north of East Grand--from an architectural sense you think it's just not quite right. But it is so right. These bell towers, now adorned with architectural facades more akin to India than East Dallas are right where they need to be.

I live in East Dallas, gratefully. I am fulfilled by morning sojourns to White Rock Lake and the canopy of trees that guard our comings and goings along Williamson Road. I'm comforted to know that just two miles away the Iskon Temple perhaps better known as Kalachandji's offers refuge to anyone who walks in the door--don't forget to say hello to the cat on the way.

This temple is the spiritual home of the Hare Krishna movement: a clan of devotees sadly misunderstood by many with the wave of "hippy Hare Krisnhnas" in the 1970's. Perhaps the "Advocacy in Airports" was not their best play, but if you're curious enough you will discover people who are among the the kindest, gentlest souls in our community. This is not a cult. This is culture.

I imagine many of you know the restaurant: a delightful enclave in the middle of the campus offering some of the best vegetarian cuisine in Dallas. The buffet-style service offers a menu that changes daily: dahl, pappadam, cauliflower, okra, vegetable lasagna, salads and eggplant are among my favorites. and of course the tamarind tea. If you haven't been there, I encourage you lean in to the awkwardness of not quite knowing the flow: ask questions; sit where you want to (the patio is lovely) and soak up the goodness of really healthy food in a mindful environment surrounded by a scared space.

Here's what you may not know about the restaurant. The food that is served was prepared for the central deity of the temple: Kalachandji, ("the beautiful moon-faced one"). This object of devotion/ cultural icon/ work of art (as you wish to experience it) was once one of the most revered statues in India and during the Mogul invasion, devotees took great risk to hide and protect the sculpture from the plunderers. From there, Kalachandji's journey is a dramatic one: this deity, this sculpture is not supposed to be in Dallas, Texas, but it is, thankfully.  Everyone associated with the temple wants you to know seeing the figure in the temple (which is dressed, cared for and given offerings daily by loving compassionate devotees) is a sacred experience--culturally, spiritually,  or just as a human who is curious about the world.

If you take this opportunity with some familiarity to the Crow Collection of Asian Art, you can begin to understand how communities participated and engaged with objects of devotion like our sculptures of Vishnu, Garuda, Ganesha and Buddha. The Sri Sri Radha Kalachandji Mandir Hare Krishna Temple is a living museum bringing works of life to art and works of art to life.  On your first visit, explore the temple. Before entering, take your shoes off, enter room just across from the restaurant, ring the bell, hope that the curtain is drawn open on the deities at the altar, tour the very special murals of Krishna's life in the paintings by B.G. Sharma and just sit. Sit and breathe for a few moments under the trompe l'oeil sky. This is the real gift of the Hare Krisna Community: more than food, more than communion, this is a place to be quiet. If you sit long enough, you just may hear the melodious sounds of Krishna playing the flute and calling the cows. 

Crow 31 Days: Day Two: The Spice of Life

May is Asian-American Pacific Islander Month, and the museum where I work is honoring the leaders and spaces in our community where the best aspects of Asian Art and Culture are taught experienced and cherished.

One of those places for me is Sapna's kitchen. Sapna Punjabi-Gupta is the founder and creative force behind Naivedhya: an innovative company offering education and access to a healthier, happier life based on the teachings of the age-old Indian wellness traditions of Ayurveda.

Her YouTube Videos are the bomb of health and nutrition: Sapna, in her loving and compassionate way, invites you in: in to experience and explore all of the delicious benefits of a life well balanced. Sapna is a treasure of a teacher, whether in the classroom here at the Crow Collection (we are working on a fall series!), at a workshop in her home or via the graces of the world wide web. She is patient and clever, informed and insightful: Sapna's own journey as a skillful dietician and a lifetime student of health inspires others to be curious, to experiment and to make the best kinds of changes.

Sapna's product line and her recommended essentials for good healthy living bolster her capacity to help create a new future. She has a new aspect of her company offering Ayurvedic sessions, helping new clients understand their doshas (body type) and how to design a life that works with the human that we are. Her one-on-one work and the wildly popular classes at Central Market demonstrate her range and passion for a healthier community: one that is compassionate to ourselves, others and the beautiful world we all share.

It's her kitchen, though that I love the most. Sapna is a designer of beautiful food, beautiful spaces and a very beautiful life. Her kitchen is a teaching kitchen where she hosts remarkable experiences for small groups of students most months of the year. It's a place to experiment and connect and as Sapna teaches she pulls culture and history to us. She is the demonstration of cooking with love and the wisdom of the vedas. Her home is a haven: the aromas of cardamom and ginger mix easily with laughter and joy. It has the warmth and compassion of your Mother's Kitchen. And I promise you, this is the best cup of Chai you can find in Dallas.

So try it out! Explore a video or two--the Ojas Truffles are better than candy--and so much better for you. Take a class or dive into Sapna's very informative blog. Nutrition is calling--it's time to Be Spiced!

Crow 31 Days of Asia: Day ONE

This May, in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I will be telling stories: stories of the amazing people and experiences I have come to know through my work as the Executive Director of the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

Our community is a vibrant landscape for learning about Asia through culture and art, and I hope to share a few of many perspectives over the next thirty-one days.

On April 29th of 2016,  Former President Obama made a proclamation: to establish an annual month-long celebration of the contributions of the Asian American / Pacific Islander (AAPI) members of our community. He wrote: “Today, AAPIs lend their rich heritage to enhancing our communities and our culture.  As artists and activists, educators and elected officials, servicemen and women and business owners, AAPIs help drive our country forward.” 

I will carry forward his call to action with this storytelling practice sharing stories that honor the ingenuity, brilliance, and commitment Asian-Americans give our city. There are moments, initiatives and places in our city: community centers, studios, temples, gardens, museums, non-profits, businesses and restaurants that were created by leaders, compassionate leaders, working every day to make our city better and more international.

There is a deep generosity and compassion in this work of place-making. The Asian-American leaders I have come to know are committed to sharing their culture. This commitment has built our museum program after program for the last 19 years. Their commitment has built Dallas as an international city.

I need your help making this project robust, meaningful and reflective of the culture we hope to share. Post your stories and experiences for others to know and to honor the innovators that inspire you. Please tag the Crow Collection of Asian Art and use #Crow31Daysand connect our stories. Asia has a story to tell in Dallas: one of vibrant and bold innovation and meaningful connection. Help us tell the story of 31 Days of Asia–because we all really know in Dallas, if you look closely, you can experience a life made better by exploring Asian Art and Culture every day of the year.