Forms of Awakening: Tibetan Art from the Jack Shear Collection
Edited by Benjamin Bogin, Ariana Maki, and Rachel Seligman
Contributions by Benjamin Bogin, Choni Tsepak Namgyal, Wen-shing Chou, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, Janice Glowski, Nawang Tsering Gurung, Noa Jones, Ariana Maki, Andrew Quintman, Rachel Seligman, Riga Shakya, and Dominique Townsend
Designed by: Content Object, Kimberly Varella with Gabrielle Pulgar
Casebound hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: DelMonico Books • DAP and The Tang Museum at Skidmore College, 2025
ISBN: 978-1-63681-164-2
Dimensions: 8.5 × 12 in.
Separations: Echelon, Los Angeles
Printing: Conti Tipocolor, Florence, Italy
After years of collecting, Jack Shear gifted over 60 works of traditional Tibetan Buddhist art to three university museums—the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, and the Williams College Museum of Art—forming a traveling exhibition of thangkas and other devotional objects. Forms of Awakening unites these exhibitions through a catalogue of Shear’s collection alongside scholarly essays exploring Tibetan visual culture.
Bound in a rich green Buckram paper, the cover dons a solid red foil stamp and gold-gilded texts. Sewn in are three ribbons, each representing the three sections of the book: Texts, Gift, and Archive. Each section is further distinguished by paper and ink changes. Texts is printed CMYK on a bulky uncoated paper plus a green spot color for text and paper tint. A bilingual book, the Tibetan and English appear on opposing pages, in a minimal and mirrored layout, allowing past and present to coexist without hierarchy.
The Gift, starting on a flooded bright red page, presents vibrant CMYK reproductions on a matte coated paper, giving the thangkas an ethereal presence, with details crossing the gutter to highlight the intricacy of each work. Archive, appears on a soft pink-tinted thin paper. A directory of sorts, this section documents each institution’s exhibition through archival material and installation views.
These shifts in material and structure create a layered reading experience, reflecting both the spiritual depth of the objects and the evolving ways Tibetan visual culture is interpreted today.
