Border Crossing: Historians of Islamic Art Association 2018 Biennial Symposium (original) (raw)

CATCHING UP ON ISLAMIC ART: Eastern Art Report Issue 53

Author: Sajid Rizvi. First published 2007 in Eastern Art Report, London. Art museums are scrambling to attract more audiences for Islamic art, both historical materials and contemporary art from the wide expanse of the Middle East and North Africa region, Central Asia and the Caucasus. The aim ostensibly is to build up visitor numbers and public understanding of Islamic cultures and civilisations. Can this increased interest in Islamic art and culture substitute for a greater commitment to effecting constructive change where it matters — on the political and military fronts? Copyright restrictions apply on re-use. Queries to: SajidRizvi@eapgroup.com

Islamic Art (St. John's University, Fall 2014; Fashion Institute of Technology, Fall 2012)

The first half of this course offers a survey of the art and architecture of major Islamic dynasties, emphasizing similarities and differences across the breadth of their historical, geographic, and cultural contexts. The religion of Islam and its fundamental concepts and terminology are presented, along with major artworks and monuments. Building upon this foundation, the remainder of the semester explores art historical topics (such as calligraphy, portraiture, and landscape gardens) across dynasties. Throughout the semester, we will draw upon visual and textual primary source material through in-class examinations of short texts and artworks featured on the Metropolitan Museum of Art web site. At the end of the semester, we will visit the Met to see many of these works in person and discuss contemporary practices of displaying Islamic art to the public. Through this course, students will attain confidence in recognizing, describing, and interpreting Islamic art and architecture with a trained eye and a critical mind.

Reframing Islamic Art for the 21st Century

Horizons in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017

The celebrated Islamic galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reopened in 2011 as “Galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.” Other major collections of Islamic art have been reorganized and reinstalled in Berlin, Cairo, Cleveland, Copenhagen, Detroit, Kuwait, London, Los Angeles, Paris, and Singapore, and new museums of Islamic art have been established in Doha, Qatar; Honolulu, Hawaii; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Sharjah, U.A.E. In addition, the first museum in North America dedicated to Islamic art recently opened in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This article explores this global phenomenon, identifying it as both a literal and conceptual “reframing of Islamic art for the 21st century,” setting the world stage for new developments in cultural understanding.

ISLAMIC ART VI 2009: Studies on the Art and Culture of the Muslim World

Ernst Grube and Eleanor Sims, eds, Serpil Bağcı, Manijeh Bayani, Nahla Nassar, assistant editors. Distributed worldwide by Saffron, Islamic Art is published by The Bruschettini Foundation for Islamic and Asian Art, Genova, and The East-West Foundation, New York. Editors' Note (excerpt): Preparing our customary Editors’ Note for this sixth volume of Islamic Art, we are struck by the many developments that have shaped the issue you hold in your hands. To begin with, it is not the volume so long intended. What had been envisioned as an already-large component of Volume VI instead grew so large that the wiser course seemed to publish it separately: the first supplement to Islamic Art, The Painted Ceilings of the Cappella Palatina, by Ernst J. Grube and Jeremy Johns, appeared in 2005. A detailed examination of the complex iconographical content of the paintings which decorate the celebrated ceilings of this building, erected by order of the Norman King of Sicily around 1140, it seeks to identify the multitudinous sources of these paintings. They range from the Ancient Near East and the Classical world to Romanesque Europe but are overlaid by myriad Islamic forms and manners, especially those developed in the Maghrib and Fatimid Egypt. Unique as a pictorial cycle, the ceilings of the Cappella Palatina may now be seen as an extraordinary and unique fusion of Eastern and Western traditions taking place near the very edge of the Western Islamic world. If Supplement I to Islamic Art focuses on the medieval period in the Muslim West, Volume VI looks primarily toward the Muslim East.