Megan Culler

My master’s qualifying paper focuses on a set of twenty astrological paintings in the Freer Gallery’s collections. Currently, encountering the set in the museum predetermines the images as individual works, unified in their striking borders and vibrant, red-colored backgrounds. However, throughout my research, I discovered that these now-separate paintings once joined together to form part of a vertical horoscope scroll, which intricately detailed an individual’s life – the paintings serving as magical diagrams. Because of this discovery, my thesis unfurls the painting’s complex function, reconstructing their image in their original historical context. My paper also further considers the painting’s journey after the scroll’s fragmentation, granting an opportunity to present a different way of thinking about astrological art independent of its everyday use. In viewing the merit of these images as a scroll, as individual paintings for worship, and as objects circulating within the art market, the Freer paintings present an invigorating study as fragments of a scroll and twenty individual paintings. This duality creates a unique interpretation of the paintings, both historically pertinent as scroll fragments and contemporarily relevant as individual works of art.

In reference to Pamela Singh’s work:
Dynamic swirling planets and astrological charts overlay the artist’s original self-portrait, unfocused almost to the point of abstraction. The stark, rusty-orange tones counterbalance the ethereal steely-blues, representing the heavens and Earth. This photograph – part of a more extensive series titled Tantric Self-Portrait in Jaipur by the contemporary Indian photographer, Pamela Singh – creates an enigmatic, dreamlike illusion that suspends the artist in space and time. For me, this photograph offers a poetic rhythm to the contemplation of the self in the cosmos. Its ambiguity impresses how we, as art historians, continually question and discover meaning in an ever-changing, impermanent world.