Image courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Where do the spirits of a place go once their people are displaced or otherwise forced to abandon their homes? This question provides inspiration for classically trained Tibetan artist Tsherin Sherpa.
His family left Tibet around 1950, and at age 30, he moved from Nepal to California. “Tsherin Sherpa: Spirits,” a 36-piece mid-career retrospective of Sherpa’s work, continues through Oct. 16 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Sherpa’s vivid realizations are mashups of ancient Buddhist and Tibetan representations with that which is contemporary. The spiritual figures, uprooted from their tradition, seek forms of accommodation with the new world in which they find themselves.
