Community Curator:
Bruce Owens

Community Collaborators:

Milan Gurung, Founder' Chairperson and  Vice Chairman of Board of Trustee at Pashupatinath Buddha Foundation of New England, CEO & Founder at BostonNepal.com and Former President at Greater Boston Nepali Community

The Muss | Musical Group

Parashu Phuyal | Nepalese Services Coordinator of Somerville

Samanta Bajracharya | Ordained Buddhist Priest; serving New Buddhists of the Boston Metropolitan area

Sanjeev Tuladhar | Founding member of the New Organization of New England

Geshe Tenley | Resident Teacher, Kurukulla Center for Tibetan Buddist Studies

Rukmini Karki | Senior Advocate at the Asian Task Force against Domestic Violence (ATASK)

A Community Curator exhibition curated by Bruce Owens

January, 16th - March, 29th, 2024

The Art of the Festival features photographs, cultural artifacts, and works of fine art and popular culture that tell the story of the largest festival of the Kathmandu Valley. Practiced for nearly 1,400 years, this festival is devoted to a rain god who is honored by both Hindus and Buddhists and is known by many names, Buṃgadyaḥ and Rāto Matysendranāth foremost among them. People of Kathmandu from all walks of life each play their part in creating a dramatic spectacle in which hundreds of people pull the deity in a towering chariot that is as precarious as it is massive. Their success or failure is tied to the fate of the country. The photographs at the core of this exhibition were taken by Bruce McCoy Owens over the past four decades and were shown by invitation in three major exhibitions in Nepal in 2016. Like the festival itself, the exhibit is a collaborative creation, and includes stories of people in the Somerville area who share their memories,  as well as objects, that hold special meaning in connection with Nepalese festivities.

Learn more about the Community Curator Program.

Bruce Owens: Bruce McCoy Owens is an anthropologist and photographer who has always used photographs as a research tool. By presenting photos as gifts and showing them in exhibitions they have also served him as a means of reciprocating the generosity of those who teach him about the cultures he studies. He has been working in Nepal since 1982 on projects that concern sacred places and religious festivity. His longest-term project has been the chariot festival of Bũgadyaḥ, also known as Rāto Matsyendranāth, probably the largest festival of the Kathmandu Valley. At the conclusion of the festival of 2014, several key festival participants suggested that he create an exhibition in honor of the highly-elaborate twelve-year version of the festival to be celebrated the following year. This ultimately led to his being invited to mount an exhibition at the Patan Museum, a National Museum of Nepal, and to participate in Photo Kathmandu 2016, an international outdoor photography festival. These exhibits have since led to another exhibit at the American University in Paris in the spring of 2022 and two more exhibits mounted by the Patan Museum in 2019 and 2024 that drew from Owens’s prints that are now in their permanent collection. The Taragaon Cultural Center and Museum, also in Nepal, has also acquired several of Owens’s prints. Apart from the inclusion of a few of his photographs in the Dharma and Puṇyaexhibit at the Cantor Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross in 2020, the exhibit at the Somerville Museum is the first in the United States presented on the scale of his previous shows in Nepal.

Funded [in part] by an American Rescue Plan Act grant from the City of Somerville.