CLAREMONT, CA.- 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 Skyspace by James Turrell (Pomona ’65), Dividing the Light, on the Pomona College campus and a suite of six abstract acrylic paintings by Marcia Hafif (Pomona ’51) that, drawing on Minimalist principles, evoke the city of Rome solely through color, without explicit references to objects, landscape, or narrative.

Select works in the exhibition are accompanied by audio “stops” by different contributors: Ana Maria Dorrance, a professor at Loyola Marymount University and certified mindfulness teacher; René Garcia (Pomona ’27), a major in public policy analysis; and Omer Shah, assistant professor of anthropology at Pomona. Each of the audio tracks situates the objects in their historic and cultural contexts while foregrounding their use in contemplative practice.

The Meditative Object is organized by Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton and associate professor of art history, and curatorial intern Tristen Alizée Leone ’26.