Rubin Museum’s Tibetan Shrine Will Move to Brooklyn Museum

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room at the Rubin Museum, a centerpiece of its extensive collection of art from Himalayan Asia, will move to the Brooklyn Museum for six years starting next June as the Rubin closes its building and prepares to become a “museum without walls.”

The Rubin announced in January that it would close its building in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and focus on traveling exhibitions and long-term loans of its holdings.

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room is the first of those loans. It is not a formal acquisition; the Rubin will still own the exhibit, a collection of more than 100 works of art and ritual objects arranged to recreate an elaborate private shrine, and members of the Rubin’s curatorial staff will be involved in its presentation at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Rubin was founded in 2004 to house the art collection of the philanthropists Donald and Shelley Rubin. The museum is closing on Oct. 6, after its last exhibition ends, with plans to sell its building on West 17th Street, which the Rubin family bought in 1998 for $22 million and which once housed the women’s wear wing of Barneys New York.

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room is one of the Rubin’s most popular installations, an immersive look at how art, furniture and ritual items might be arranged in a household shrine. The elements of the exhibit, including simulated butter lamps, recordings of chanted prayers and a faint smell evocative of incense, will be moved into a new custom space that the Brooklyn Museum is preparing in its second-floor Arts of Asia galleries.

“For us, it was very important that the integrity of the shrine room experience as you walk in was retained,” said Jorrit Britschgi, the director of the Rubin. “We really looked for a space where you could have that moment of quiet contemplation, or feeling like you’re walking into a different type of space.”