New Children's Museum exhibit explores world religions with $2.5 million Lilly grant

Buddhist chants sound near a reimagined Jordanian mosaic map. Woodcarving tools sit next to spiritual art with origins that transcend centuries. Immersive videos in a dome theater make visitors feel as if they're standing at famous religious sites.The Children's Museum's newest exhibit is a global village bustling with worship traditions.

"Sacred Places" aims to accomplish a challenging feat: to facilitate understanding among believers from different faiths as well as those who consider themselves non-religious. That means explaining longstanding traditions alongside personal stories of young people that children can relate to.

"The idea of religion is a hard topic," said Monica Ramsey, the museum's vice president of experience development and family learning. "We want to create a space where kids and their adults can have these conversations together."

The museum built Sacred Places with $2.5 million from the Lilly Endowment — one of four Indiana sites to receive a Religion and Cultural Institutions Initiative grant in 2020.

The exhibit will open at 4 p.m., in time for the $6-admission First Thursday of September, and run through April 7, 2024, before traveling elsewhere. Inside "Sacred Places," visitors will find more than 30 stories that come to life through personal possessions, young guides' life experiences, videos and more.

Travel to these six sites across the world

The roots of Sacred Places go back more than a decade, when the Lilly Endowment began making grants that led, in part, to the museum's 2015 temporary exhibit about spiritual pilgrimages.

The museum learned "the ways in which to have conversations with faith leaders and others in the community and also what it means to talk about religion in families and with children," said the Rev. Dr. Jessicah Duckworth, religion program director for the Lilly Endowment.

Through these efforts, the museum built relationships with faith communities and CyArk, an organization that digitally records cultural heritage, which helped them identify six major spiritual sites for the current exhibit, museum President and CEO Jennifer Pace Robinson told IndyStar.

They are:

• Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue (Willemstad, Curaçao, an island north of Venezuela): Oldest synagogue in the Americas that still has weekly services. Founded by Jewish families who traveled from the Netherlands in the 1650s.

• The Beheading of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church (Madaba, Jordan): Built in the late 1800s upon ruins of the ancient city, which was a popular stop for people as they journeyed to the Holy Land in Jerusalem and other kingdoms.

• Great Mosque of Djenné (Djenné, Mali): Largest mud structure in the world where Muslims have worshiped for more than 100 years.

• Patan Durbar Square (Lalitpur, Nepal): Keshav Narayan Temple, among the dozens of Hindu temples around the area.

• Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island (remote island west of Chile in the Pacific Ocean): Famous for its "moai" — ancient large stone figures that are representations of ancestors and key to the island's spiritual traditions.

• Wat Arun (Bangkok, Thailand): Temple with a large Buddha statue where Buddhists pray.

In addition to these six sites, panels throughout the exhibit are dedicated to stories of St. John's Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis; the Bahá'i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois; and Shinto's Itsukushima Shrine in Japan, among others.

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'Tell us your stories'

Sharing these types of stories with the public first meant building trust with the local spiritual communities, organizers said. One key example is a small moai, or statue, which the museum commissioned Rapa Nui artisan Koro Pablo Hereveri to carve.

"Rather than just going in and saying, 'Oh, here's something we want; we're going to take it,' we allowed them to introduce us to the artisans who are producing today and to say, 'Tell us your stories and then, tell us what's appropriate to do with these things,'" Chris Carron, the museum's director of collections, told IndyStar.

That means displaying the moai's coral eyes beside it in the display case, Carron said. Placing them on the face is reserved for calling on the ancestral spirit's protective power, so doing so at the museum would be disrespectful, he said.

Other items — like a woodcarving of a Hindu god, Jewish prayer book and liturgy book in Arabic from a Catholic Mass — are among new commissions, loaned items or come from the museum's permanent collection, Pace Robinson said.

Just as important as the stories, organizers said, are the people behind them.

Breaking down complex topics for kids

Accompanying each of the six major sites is a friendly guide who actively practices in that belief system. Visiting Wednesday was Jude Anton Twal, who worships at The Beheading of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Jordan.

At a Wednesday panel discussion, she related a story in which she and friends ditched school to eat lunch in the church's steeple and watch people below.

"It's not just sacred because we get to practice our faith. It's because we get to feel free doing it," she said.

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Other guides will visit Indianapolis in the coming days, Pace Robinson said. In the museum's interactives, they talk about their daily worship rituals, which can help bridge differences in belief systems.

"This is a person's real life. It's hard to argue or say, 'Oh, that's not true when it's Jude telling her story," Pace Robinson told IndyStar.

More interactive features help break down challenging topics. Visitors, for example, can stand in an immersive dome theater and feel like they're at Japan's Fushimi Inari Shrine, surrounded by people in front of Jerusalem's Wailing Wall or watching a gathering of Indianapolis' Gurdwara Sikh Satsang.

Find more information at childrensmuseum.org/exhibits/sacred-places.

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Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or d.bongiovanni@indystar.com. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter: @domenicareports.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: New Children's Museum of Indianapolis exhibit explores world religions