Description
Register here: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_x2EsaUs6SSKlcZDcQqAIbQ
In 1906, pioneering collector Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) bequeathed his collection of American, Asian, ancient Near Eastern, and Islamic art to the Smithsonian. This gift established the Smithsonian’s first art museum and formed the foundational collection of today’s National Museum of Asian Art. Representing ongoing research utilizing network analysis tools, this talk explores Freer’s efforts to collect ancient Near Eastern and Islamic art from 1907 to 1909. Data compiled from Freer’s diaries and from museum records as well as photographic materials and contextual research allow for the visualization of Freer’s interconnected world. Project team members will focus on the initial findings about the complex relationships between Freer and the artists, business associates, collectors, dealers, and scholars he interacted with in the United States, Europe, and the Near East.
This talk is part of the monthly lunchtime series Sneak Peek: New Research from the National Museum of Asian Art, where staff members present brief, personal perspectives and ongoing research, followed by discussion. In 2022, the series will focus on collecting practices and the collections of the National Museum of Asian Art.
Sana Mirza is head of the Scholarly Programs and Publications Department, which manages the museum’s symposia, workshops, fellowship program, and peer-reviewed publications. She received her PhD in Islamic art from the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) in 2021. Her research interests include artistic interchange in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and digital art history.
Jeffrey Smith is the assistant registrar for collections information in the museum’s Collections Department. As both a registrar and the system administrator for the collections database, he is responsible for all aspects of the collections information used within the museum and shared externally. Since joining NMAA in 2004, he has been focused on standardizing and enhancing collections and thesaurus data to improve TMS and to make possible new features for its online offerings. He has shared his experience with managing data for online catalogues, provenance, and network analysis in presentations given in the United States, Europe, and Israel.
Most recently, Nancy Micklewright was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, working on Ottoman fashion for her next book. Her edited volume, Mohamed Zakariya, The Life and Times of a 21st-century Calligrapher, will appear in 2022. Through 2019 she was head of the Department of Public and Scholarly Engagement at NMAA. A former university professor and senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, she is the author of two earlier books and numerous articles on aspects of visual culture in the Ottoman Empire.
Zeynep Simavi is the Istanbul branch director of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT). Previously, she was NMAA’s program specialist for scholarly programs and publications. Her research interests include the formation of Islamic art as an academic discipline and the histories of collections and exhibitions in the United States. She is currently a PhD candidate in art history at Istanbul Technical University, and her dissertation focuses on the curators, collectors, and major exhibitions of Turkish art in the twentieth-century United States.
Image: Tile, Il-Khanid dynasty, 1250–1300, Iran, Rayy, stone-paste painted over turquoise glaze with gold, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, Freer Gallery of Art, F1908.165
