Senses of Springtime—Celebrate India!
Festival for All Ages, May 17, at Met Museum

Event Date: Sunday, May 17, 2015
Event Time: 1:00–5:00 p.m.
Location:Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, Manhattan

India will be the focus as The Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrates spring with a special multisensory festival on Sunday, May 17, from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. The festival Senses of Springtime—Celebrate India! is free with Museum admission, and suitable for visitors of all ages. The program includes performances, stories, and dance workshops; art-making activities; and demonstrations. The recently opened landmark exhibition Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy will be available for viewing (gallery 199, on view through July 26). The public cafeteria will feature a special menu for purchase.

The day’s program will open with a festive performance at 1:00 p.m. in the Museum’s Great Hall featuring classical music and dance by youth from Navatman, a South Asian performing art group. (The group will also close the festival with a performance at 4:10.) Also on the day’s program:

• Iron Chef Jehangir Mehta and staff will demonstrate the rich scents and rainbow of spices used in Indian cooking (30-minute sessions at 1:00, 1:45, 2:30 3:15, and 4:00 p.m.). Recipes to try at home will be distributed. 
• Sitarist Neel Murgai and tabla master Shivalik Ghoshal will perform traditional Indian music associated with springtime at 2:00 and 3:30 p.m.
• The Children’s Museum of Manhattan will provide a three-dimensional experience of the colors, shapes, and patterns of Indian architecture (30-minute sessions at 1:20, 2:30, 3:30, and 4:30 p.m.)
• Throughout the day, the Institute of Bollywood Dance and Film will lead participatory workshops in classical Indian royal court dance and Bollywood dance for various age groups.
• Drop-in art activities, running continuously, will focus on jewelry, kite making, scented paper flowers, and miniature paintings.
• Drop-in gallery demonstrations, running continuously, will include sari and dhoti (pants) styles, tools and materials for stone sculpture, and temporary henna tattoos.
• Picture books and stories about India will be the focus of quiet time for younger visitors (ages 3 and up) in the Museum’s Nolen Library. 
• A Tot Spot for early learners (ages 1 through 8) will include books and blocks. 

The festival will be featured on the Museum’s website as well as on Instagram and Twitter via the hashtag #metfest.

Upcoming Event
A MetFridays Gallery Event for teens and adults, also part of the Museum’s Celebrate India! programing, will take place on Friday, June 19, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. The evening mini-festival will feature music, poetry, fragrance, and jewelry demonstrations. It is presented in collaboration with Poets House. The event, which is free with Museum admission, is part of MetFridays: New York’s Night Out.

Featured Exhibition
At its zenith, the diamond-rich Deccan plateau of south-central India became home to Indian and Persian artists, the abode of African elites, and the place where European discoverers embraced new tastes in textiles and gems. The landmark exhibition Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy explores the unmistakable character of classical Deccani art through some 200 masterpieces from major international, private, and royal collections in various media: poetic lyricism in painting, lively creations in metalwork, and a distinguished tradition of textile production.

About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s largest and finest museums, with collections spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present and from every part of the globe. Located at the edge of Central Park along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Museum welcomed 6.2 million visitors last year.

The Multicultural Audience Development Initiative began more than 10 years ago at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It reflects the Museum’s founding mission to educate and inspire by reaching out to all of its constituencies, including the many diverse communities of the New York tristate area. Its objectives are to increase awareness of the Museum’s global collections and programs, to diversify its visitorship and Membership, and to increase participation in its programs.

Credits:
Senses of Springtime: Celebrate India! Made possible by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Peter Louis and Chandru Ramchandani, the Great Circle Foundation, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Presented by the Museum’s Multicultural Audience Development Initiative and the Education Department in consultation with Cool Culture and the Indo-American Arts Council.

MetFridays Gallery Event: Made possible by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, Peter Louis and Chandru Ramchandani, and The Persepolis Foundation.

Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy: Made possible by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, the Placido Arango Fund, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky. Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Education programs are made possible by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and the Deccan Heritage Foundation.

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May 8, 2015

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