Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples

How has humanity given form to spiritual beliefs across time and cultures? Living with the Gods: Art, Beliefs, and Peoples explores that quest in an expansive exhibition featuring more than 200 objects from the past 4,000 years.

As a capstone for the Museum’s centennial year, British art historian and former museum director Neil MacGregor was invited to revisit his 2017 BBC radio series and book of the same title, bringing that vision to the MFAH collections, along with many exceptional loans from museums and private collections.

Displayed in dialogue across a suite of 11 galleries, masterpieces in the installation explore elemental themes: the cosmos, light, water, and fire; the mysteries of life and death; the divine word; and pilgrimage. Living with the Gods includes ancient, historic, and contemporary works drawn from regions across Africa, Asia, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. 

For millennia, people have been making objects to communicate with their God or gods and to sustain their communities. MacGregor’s acclaimed radio series and book chronicled this essential, enduring form of human expression. The MFAH is honored to partner with him in bringing that vision to Houston.

“This exhibition is about how people everywhere have made beautiful things to negotiate their place in time and in the world; and how we use works of art to think about how we relate to each other. Putting art into that context allows for a different conversation. In museums, many great objects can lose their original purpose, which was spiritual. An exhibition of this kind can give that purpose back to them, allowing a new and deeper approach to great and familiar works.” —Neil MacGregor