Stephen P. Huyler is an art historian, cultural anthropologist, photographer and author conducting a lifelong survey of India's art and crafts and their meanings within rural societies. He has spent an average of four months each year during the last thirty-seven years traveling in Indian villages documenting craftsmanship and contemporary traditions. After focusing on ritual Hinduism for the past decade, he has recently returned to his original passion: women's art and identity in India. Huyler received his B.A. in Indian Studies at the University of Denver and then his doctorate at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. <P> <img src="images/misc/image_stephen.jpg" alt="" width="190" height="286" hspace="15" vspace="5" border="1" align="left"> In 1985, Dr. Huyler published Village India with Abrams (NY), the first and, as yet, only book that surveys rural Indian life and cultures throughout the subcontinent. His second book, Painted Prayers: Women's Art in Village India documents women's ritual wall and floor decoration, and was published by Rizzoli International in 1994, as well as in British, French, and German editions. Based upon interviews with hundreds of Indian women, it portrays how the women of India create sacred art as a means to bring balance into their lives. Huyler's third book, drawn from his thesis and entitled: Gifts of Earth: Terracottas and Clay Sculptures of India was released in India in 1996 by Mapin Press, Ahmedabad. It is to date the most intensive cross-cultural survey of the Indian potters' and clay sculptors' craft. His fourth book, Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion (Yale), has been acclaimed widely as the best current introduction to practical Hinduism, a religion that accounts for one in five human beings. He is presently working on three new books: India's Daughters: Art and Identity (based on interviews with 20 women artists), Sonabai: Another Way of Seeing (about a self-taught sculptor in remote central India), and Sunita: Growing Up In An Indian Village (a children's book about Sonabai's eight-year-old granddaughter.) Aside from these major publications, he has written numerous articles and separate chapters on terracottas, women's ritual painting, rural India's arts and cultures, and aspects of daily Hindu devotion. <P> Stephen Huyler has served as a consultant and/or curator for 24 museum exhibitions about India. Several of those shows have been collections of Indian art. He co-curated an exhibition about sacred rituals in India entitled Puja: Expressions of Hindu Devotion which opened at the Smithsonian Institution's Sackler Gallery in Washington D.C in 1996 and ran for over four years, closing in the summer of 2000. Huyler has also had many museum exhibitions of his photographs. Because of the great popularity of his Smithsonian exhibition, he curated a traveling show comprised of photographs and interactive wooden shrines entitled Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion that traveled through US, India and the UK. Its largest incarnation was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York from September, 2001, until April, 2002. He is currently developing a traveling exhibition about entitled: Sonabai: Another Way of Seeing which will open at the Mingei International Museum of World Folk Art in San Diego in June, 2009. Dr. Huyler lives in Camden, Maine, although he spends several months each winter in India and during the rest of the year frequently travels to lecture at universities and museums in the U.S. and the U.K. <P>
email.
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mail. 10 Sea Street, Camden, ME 04843
