Exploring 4,000 Years of Spiritual Belief and Practice through 200 Great Works of Art in the Exhibition “Living with the Gods,” Opening in October

As a capstone for the Museum’s centennial year, Neil MacGregor has been invited to revisit his 2017 BBC radio series and book of the same title, bringing that vision to the MFAH collections, along with many exceptional loans.

HOUSTON—August 7, 2024—In October, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will present Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples, an expansive exhibition of more than 200 objects made over 4,000 years in order to help humans make contact with the divine. For the exhibition, MFAH Director Gary Tinterow has invited British art historian and longtime museum director Neil MacGregor to revisit MacGregor’s 2017 BBC radio series and book of the same title, bringing that vision to great objects in the MFAH collections as well as landmark loans from international institutions.

Living with the Gods will present works from the MFAH collections to emphasize their original, spiritual intent. The exhibition will feature unprecedented loans from the Prado, Madrid, and the collections of the City Palace, royal residence of the Maharaja of Jaipur, and significant loans from other institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; the Menil Collection, Houston; National Gallery of Ireland; and the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City. The Ministry of Culture, Greece, supported important loans from the Benaki Museum, Athens, as well as the Church of Agios Matthias Sinaites, Heraklion, a dependency of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.

Displayed in dialogue across a suite of 11 galleries, masterpieces in the installation will explore elemental themes, among them: the cosmos, light, water, fire; the mysteries of life and death; the divine word; and pilgrimage. Living with the Gods will draw from regions across ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe and the Americas and will include both historic and contemporary works. 

Commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, “For millennia, people have been making art to communicate with their God or gods and to sustain their communities. Neil MacGregor’s acclaimed 2017 BBC radio series and book brilliantly chronicled this enduring form of human expression. We are honored that he brought that perspective to Houston, making it visible through objects chosen from our own collections as well as some truly exceptional loans. This exhibition is a magnificent capstone to our first century as a museum."

“This exhibition is about how people everywhere have made beautiful things to negotiate their place in time and in the world; and how we use works of art to think about how we relate to each other,” said Neil MacGregor. “Putting art into that context allows for a different conversation. In museums, many great objects can lose their original purpose, which was spiritual. An exhibition of this kind can give that purpose back to them, allowing a new and deeper approach to great and familiar works.”

The installation will unfold across 10 thematic sections, each composed of objects from the MFAH collections and anchored by significant loans. The show will explore how global cultures across millennia have found the divine in the physical world and its phenomena—the cosmos, time, light, darkness, fire, water, animals—and how they created objects to reflect that spiritual view of the world around them. Among the outstanding featured works:

Divine Water: Gangajali from the Maharaja’s City Palace, Jaipur (1894–96) This large silver urn was one of three commissioned by the Royal Palace, Jaipur, in 1894. When Maharaja Madho Singh II was invited to King Edward IV’s coronation in London in 1902, special dispensations were granted to allow him, as an orthodox Hindu, to travel overseas. Above all, he was to drink nothing but water from the river Ganges (“Gangajal”) during his three months out of India. Considered among the largest silver objects ever created, at some 5 feet in height, 15 feet around and nearly 800 pounds, the urns each could hold 900 gallons of water. This one will leave India for only the second time for this exhibition. The urns appear in the gallery that addresses water and the divine, which includes a magnificent German medieval bronze baptismal font, William H. Johnson’s powerful circa-1940 painting I Baptize Thee and a photograph of a river baptism in Louisiana taken by Chandra McCormick in the mid-1980s.

Holy Fire: Pentecost (c. 1600), by El Greco, from the Prado, Madrid This monumental altarpiece depicts the Christian holy day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit, in the form of flames, rested on the Virgin Mary and the Apostles in Jerusalem, 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The painting has rarely left the Prado since it was acquired in the late 19th century; it is shown in the “light and fire” gallery, in the context of, among other objects, a 20th-century silver Zoroastrian Afergan, or holy fire altar, on loan from a temple in Houston.

The Cosmic Cycle: A Mid-20th-Century Bedu (“Moon”) Mask from the MFAH Collection Male-female pairs of Bedu masks are danced during harvest festivals and at funerals among the Nafana, Kulango and Degha communities of the Ivory Coast and Ghana to purify villages, protect them from sickness and danger, and encourage fertility. The piece will be presented in a gallery themed to the Cosmos, with a monumental Shiva Nataraj, on loan from a private collection. Shiva is the Hindu deity whose dance in a circle of fire embodies the eternal process of destruction and renewal.  

In every case the objects open a new dimension in the human search for a relationship with the divine. Additional lenders to the exhibition include the Asia Society, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Jewish Museum, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Toledo Museum of Art; and several private collections. 

Organization and Funding
The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Lead foundation underwriting is provided by: 
Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation

Additional generous support is provided by:
Jerold B. Katz Foundation
Joan and Stanford Alexander Family
Nancy Pollok Guinee
Franci Neely
Joy and Benjamin Warren
Levant Foundation
Bettie Cartwright
Anne Lamkin Kinder
Mr. and Mrs. Rodney H. Margolis
Milton D. Rosenau, Jr. and Dr. Ellen R. Gritz

About Neil MacGregor
Neil MacGregor is a British art historian, writer and broadcaster. He was director of the National Gallery, London (1987–2002), where he oversaw the opening of the Sainsbury Wing and a complete rehang of the collection. From 2002 to 2015 MacGregor was director of the British Museum. He was a Founding Director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018, and now advises the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai. In a long collaboration with the BBC he has made many radio and television programs, some of whose accompanying books have been international best sellers: Seeing Salvation; A History of the World in 100 Objects; Germany: Memories of a Nation; and Living with the Gods. In 2010 he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK’s highest civil honor. 

About the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 
Spanning 14 acres in the heart of Houston’s Museum District, the main campus comprises the Audrey Jones Beck Building, the Caroline Wiess Law Building, the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building. Nearby, two house museums—Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, and Rienzi—present collections of American and European decorative arts. The MFAH is also home to the Glassell School of Art, with its Core Residency Program and Junior and Studio schools; and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), a leading research institute for 20th-century Latin American and Latino art. www.mfah.org

Media Contact
Melanie Fahey, Senior Publicist, MFAH 
mfahey@mfah.org | 713.800.5345