After 20 years in Chelsea, the Rubin Museum, which houses art from Tibet, Nepal and the Himalayan regions of India and China, will close its doors permanently on Sunday and transition to a touring exhibition model that will loan its collection to other institutions.
It’s a loss for New York City, which has experienced a spate of small museum closures this year, including Fotografiska and the Center for Italian Modern Art.
It’s also a loss for Nitin Ron, a docent who has led tours of the museum for 19 of its 20 years.
“This museum was home away from home for me,” Ron said last Wednesday on what would be one of his final tours. “I’ve done 19 hikes in the Himalayas and climbed Mount Everest. So when I walked in here, this space made my heart beat faster.”
Photo by Ryan Kailath / Gothamist
A neonatal doctor at South Brooklyn Health in Coney Island, Ron arrived in New York in 2001, after a fellowship in neonatal-perinatal medicine at Brown University. A friend brought him to the museum a few days after it opened in 2004, and he hit it off with founders Donald and Shelley Rubin.
Ron soon signed up for the volunteer docent program, which at the time consisted of a year of weekly classes on topics like the tenets of Buddhism and the cultures represented at the museum, he said. (That program has since been shortened to 10 weeks.) He graduated with the inaugural class in 2005, and estimates he’s given at least two tours a month since then.
“We had actors come in to teach us how to emote in public,” said Ron. “A person from the FBI came to teach us how to read body language in a crowd.”
Since his day job at the hospital also included teaching, Ron soon made field trips to the Rubin a part of the curriculum for medical students, tying art appreciation and meditation into the practice of medicine.
The Rubin has faced the same challenges of declining attendance and growing deficits that have plagued many small art museums, and plans to sell its building on 17th Street near Seventh Avenue, according to Executive Director Jorrit Britschgi. The space was originally purchased for $22 million before it was converted into the museum.
The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room will move to the Brooklyn Museum for a six-year loan starting in June 2025.
Photo by Dave De Armas, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art
Although the collection will be kept in storage in New York, Britschgi said there are plans to tour as many of the works on the road as possible, or loan them out to other organizations.
“Our docents may be the most important people here, because they’re the intersection between what we do in the galleries and what visitors experience,” Britschgi said via Zoom.
Ron’s personal favorite work is one of the museum’s most popular: the quiet and meditative Tibetan shrine room, which will move to the Brooklyn Museum for a six-year loan starting in June 2025.
“My dad and mom also love to meditate, and when they visit from India they say, ‘Take us to the shrine room,’” Ron said. “They close their eyes and feel the energy of the place.”
Now that the museum’s doors are closing, Ron, who lives on Staten Island, is considering volunteering at the small Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art there, or perhaps giving tours of the United Nations.
“I’m going to miss the museum and my Friday evenings here connecting to people, connecting to musicians, connecting to actors, connecting to my medical students,” said Ron. “But I feel the effect has been long lasting and the museum is going to evolve into something very beautiful and even more universal.”
Museum admission is free all day Thursday through Sunday. Ron’s final tour at the Rubin will be on Friday evening, Oct. 4. The last day to visit the museum is this Sunday, Oct. 6.