Noted Tibetan artist Tsherin Sherpa presents BAMPFA’s 2023 endowed Lijin Lecture in conjunction with the exhibition Endless Knot: Struggle and Healing in the Buddhist World. He will focus on present day Himalayan art and its connections with traditional arts.

Nepal-born Sherpa currently divides his time between California and Kathmandu, where he has established the Himalayan Art Initiative to foster the preservation of traditional thangka painting methods which he learned from his father, Master Urgen Dorge. His own contemporary work, featured in Endless Knot, draws from Tibetan Buddhist iconography to comment on his diasporic experience. Recently Sherpa was the featured artist at the Nepal Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. His first solo museum exhibition, originally presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, will be on view in spring 2023 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts

A special screening of Above and Below, a documentary by Sheri Brenner about Sherpa's life and career, immediately follows the lecture. The artist originally came from Kathmandu to San Francisco as a religious painter on a fellowship from the Asian Art Museum of Francisco. Motivated by global events and social issues, he found new meaning for the ancient art of thangka painting to communicate with a wider audience, and has helped launch a new movement in Buddhist and Himalayan modern art.

Sheri Brenner, writer, producer, director and editor of Above and Below, is currently Adjunct Faculty and Media Lab Director in Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her credits include the national PBS broadcast of Sandpainting: Sacred Art of Tibet, and In Beauty I Walk: The Navajo Way to Harmony. Brenner studied film at UC Berkeley, and holds an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University.

Copresented by The South Asia Art Initiative and The Himalayan Studies Initiative at UC Berkeley.

Event Accessibility

If you have any questions about accessibility or require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact us at bampfa@berkeley.edu or call us at (510) 642-1412 (during open hours) with as much advance notice as possible. More information on accessibility services.