Exhibition dates: June 13 – September 10, 2006
Exhibition location: Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall
Press preview: Monday, June 12, 10:00 a.m. – noon
Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings – opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 13, 2006 – will explore the growth of the concept of divine kingship among ancient Maya peoples. Featuring some 150 objects – from large-scale relief sculpture in stone to small precious pieces of worked jade – the exhibition will display the grandiose ambitions of earthly rulers when they transformed themselves into gods. Dating from 900 B.C. to 550 A.D., the works in the exhibition are lent primarily from public collections in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as from collections in Europe and the United States. Emphasis will be placed on recently excavated objects that will be on view for the first time in the United States. Notable among them are pieces from the renowned Maya sites of Calakmul in Mexico and Copan in Honduras. Maya jade objects discovered in tombs in the famous Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan – the contemporary but distant central Mexican city – will also be included.
The exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The national tour is sponsored by Televisa.
The exhibition was made possible in part by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Based on an inherited tradition for interaction between royalty and supernatural powers, Maya kings of the early centuries of the Common Era portrayed themselves in the roles and costumes of deities and elaborated sacred imagery on all manner of works of art. The recent increase in the scholarship on the ancient Maya allows for a much more detailed examination of this important period in their history. At a time when the hereditary rulers of city-states were sustained by the prosperity gained by maize agriculture, they surrounded themselves with a cultivated nobility. They held forth in courts that included artists, architects, scribes, astronomers, diviners, courtiers, and servants of all sorts. The titles of many a Maya king, or "Lord" (ajaw), his wife, his subordinates, and his enemies are known today, as are details of his lives, his times, and his treasures.
In the Exhibition
The exhibition will include stone sculpture in a number of forms, from large commemorative monuments, or stelas, to small precious works of jade, a material of infinite value to all ancient Mesoamerican peoples, and one principally used for the fabrication of personal ornaments. Ceramic sculpture will have a solid presence in the exhibition, appearing in a variety of shapes and encompassing numerous lidded vessels of diverse sorts – large cache vessels often embellished with complex iconographic schemes and/or further covered with stuccoed surfaces, and smaller, more intimately scaled examples reproducing natural forms. Ceramic censers in human form, bowls with complex relief images, and vessels in the shapes of deities are included. Bone and shell were used widely in ancient times for everything from object handles to personal ornaments, examples of which will be on view. Works in jade will also be well represented. Invariably green in color, Maya jade objects are in the form of celts, beads, plaques, pendants, and three-dimensional sculpture, their hard and polishable surfaces decorated with delicate incised patterns, low relief images, hieroglyphic inscriptions, and even narrative scenes.
Depictions of Maya Lords
Maya lords themselves will be represented in the exhibition as well. They appear on stone sculpture as standing profile figures, elegantly arrayed as deities. The 76-inch-tall granite piece called Commemorative Monument (Stela 11) (Museo Nacional de Arqueología Etnología, Guatemala City) from the highland site of Kaminaljuyu (Guatemala) is one of the earliest such Maya images, dating to the last centuries of the first millennium B.C. This well-preserved object illustrates the necessary elaborateness of costume and accoutrements required for the kingly role in ritual performance. Wearing a wide belt with a great down-curving beaked profile at the center, the figure supports a stacked helmet mask with the same profiles. The great beak is associated with a divinity known rather prosaically to modern scholars as the Principal Bird Deity. He is presented in Maya myth as a brilliant emanation of early light, or sun. The transformed king in his deity regalia is placed between the earth symbol below his feet and the bird of the heavens at the top of the stela. The Kaminaljuyu lord is portrayed as the universal bridge between the heavens and earth.
Kingly images in other materials will also be included in the exhibition, such as the fourth- to fifth-century ceramic sculpture called Censer with Seated King, a cross-legged lord holding a small tray of offerings out in front of him. The rising of smoke from such censers honored deified ancestors in rituals. Funerary masks encrusted with jade are considered the last "portraits," and the funerary mask of a Calakmul lord of the first century A.D. is an illustration of this type. Calakmul, in the interior lowlands of the Mexican state of Campeche, was a powerful Maya city until the 9th century.
Source of Maya Traditions
One section of the exhibition will be devoted to the source of the inherited traditions
upon which the Maya kings elaborated. In the early first millennium B.C., the Olmec peoples of the Mexican Gulf Coast were the first to portray their rulers as divinities. Olmec imagery is presented as background to the Maya works in the exhibition.
Exhibition Catalogue and Tour
The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship.
The exhibition is currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through January 2, 2006) and will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art (February 12 – May 7, 2006) before opening at the Metropolitan Museum on June 13, 2006.
Organization Credit
The exhibition was organized by Virginia Fields, Curator of Pre-Columbian Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with Dorie Reents-Budet of the National Museum of Natural History. In New York, Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings will be organized by Julie Jones, Curator in Charge of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum.
A variety of educational programs will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, including lectures, gallery talks, a teacher workshop, and family programs in English and Spanish.
The exhibition will be featured on the Museum's website (www.metmuseum.org).
Press resources