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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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A D V E R T I S E M E N T
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The Journey of the Ka
The Middle East is a hot spot of worldwide concern right now, but it’s also home to incomparable cultural riches from the world’s oldest civilizations. So we’ve been painfully reminded by the recent looting of Iraq’s National Museum and National Library, a catastrophic loss to which the Bush administration’s blasé attitude has been nothing short of barbaric. (Defense Secretary Rumsfeld joked in the aftermath: “My goodness, were there that many vases in the whole country?” He also actually said, “Stuff happens.”) Now the world’s archeologists will be hunting down illegal antiques for decades, and the Iraqi people will have another reason to hate America. Nice going.
It’s fortuitous, then, that the Kimbell Art Museum brings us The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt. The exhibit, on loan by the Egyptian government from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, the Luxor Museum, and two archeological sites, focuses on funerary objects that detail the ancient Egyptians’ complex beliefs in the afterlife and their ongoing struggle to overcome the reality of physical death through their art. Even if the world were in far better shape than it currently is, an exhibit of this scope and magnitude would still likely be a once-in-a-lifetime event. Night & Day, and art lovers everywhere, can only hope that this show and others like it will prove that cultural exchanges with the Middle East on a large scale can still happen. It needs to happen now more than ever.
The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt runs May 4-Sep 14 at Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, FW. Admission is $7-16. Call 817-332-8451.
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