Benton Museum of Art explores meditation through centuries of contemplative works

This spring, the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College offers a focused exhibition on the role of art in the practice of meditation. The Meditative Object, on view from February 21 to June 28, 2026, features works of art from 100 CE through 2024 that deliberately engage with or promote acts of contemplation. Including objects from both religious and secular traditions, the exhibition demonstrates how art has been and remains a method for cultivating meditative states. The Meditative Object opens with the torso of a buddha that dates from 100 to 399 CE, a recent gift from Athena Tacha and Richard Spear. Renaissance drawings of rapturous and absorbed figures, on loan from a private collector, posit religious ecstasy as a contemplative state, while the intricate calligraphy of a nineteenth-century Qu’ran reveals the mesmerizing effects of both viewing and creating religious works. The exhibition concludes with works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the Skyspa