PersEternity

mm!! Today I saw a Harvard Gazette in campus which had an interesting story about an Islamic collection. Thus, tonight I went over its web page and found the article online; I think you'll enjoy it.

A well-designed museum exhibition can open windows on unfamiliar worlds. At a new exhibition at the Sackler Museum, viewers can glimpse a large, complex, and fascinating world through some rather small windows.

The exhibition is called "Closely Focused, Intensely Felt: Selections from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art." Calderwood, a scholar and collector of Islamic art, assembled her collection of ceramics, works on paper, lacquer ware, and other objects from 1968 to 1998 during numerous visits to the Middle East. Her husband, Stanford Calderwood, a former executive at Polaroid and a generous patron of the arts, gave the collection of 173 objects to Harvard in 2002.

Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, arranged the exhibition, which features about a quarter of the collection. McWilliams is working on a catalog of the entire collection, which she hopes to finish in 2005.

Calderwood, who conducted graduate work in art history and Persian language at Harvard and taught Islamic and Asian art at Boston College, concentrated her collecting efforts on Persian or "Persianate" art, a designation that includes not only modern Iran but parts of Iraq, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. The objects in the collection span 1,000 years, from ninth century ceramics to 19th century lacquer ware. In their changing styles one can see the impact of successive dynasties, foreign invasions, and religious and cultural borrowings. A comparable span of European art might begin with the Irish Book of Kells and end with the French Impressionists.

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**Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College