Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea
August 29, 2010–January 2, 2011
Rarely does an exhibition offer an entirely fresh way of viewing the art of a great civilization. Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea does exactly that. Over 90 works, many recently excavated and never before seen in the United States, offer exciting insights into the culture of the ancient Maya, focusing on the sea as a defining feature of the spiritual realm and the inspiration for powerful visual imagery.
The exhibition reflects the broad range of media used by Maya artists: massive carved stone monuments and delicate hieroglyphs, exquisite painted pottery vessels, charming sculpted human and animal figurines, and a lavish assortment of precious goods crafted from jade, gold, and turquoise. The first section of the exhibition, Water and Cosmos, explores water as the vital medium from which the world emerged, gods arose, and ancestors communicated. The objects in the second section, Creatures of the Fiery Pool, portray a wide array of fish, frogs, birds, and mythic beasts inhabiting the sea and conveying spiritual concepts. Navigating the Cosmos explores water as a source of material wealth and spiritual power. The final section, Birth to Rebirth, addresses the cyclical motion of the cosmos as the Maya pictured it.
Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea was organized by the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, and has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Because democracy demands wisdom. Additional support is provided by ECHO (Education through Cultural and Historical organizations), a program of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement. The exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.