On August 12th, QAIC’s Museum Series tackled the delicate nuances and the diverse processes that are taken into crafting a contemporary art exhibition. Curators and directors from four major contemporary art institutions – The Smart Museum in Chicago, the Asia Society Museum in New York City, the Institute of Arab & Islamic Art in New York City, and the Doha Fire Station spoke with QAIC to share their experiences. The curation process for historical art is often encyclopedic with exhibitions being created around time periods or artistic styles/movements. This then poses the question – how does one create a contemporary art exhibition when much of contemporary art often aims to redefine our conception of art? In this iteration of our Museum Series, we posed this question, along with touching on how institutions take into consideration art that contains socio-political undertones and toeing the line between being true to the authenticity of the art/artists and making ‘statements’ as an institution?

The curators featured were the following:

Orianna Cacchione – Curator of Global Contemporary Art, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago

Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe – Director, Asia Society Museum

Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani – Founding Director & Chief Curator, Institute of Arab & Islamic Art

Khalifa Al Obaidli – Director of Artists in Residence, Fire Station

QAIC’s second edition of the Museum Series focused on Indigenous Art collections from the National Museum of Qatar in Doha, Qatar, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The curators featured were the following:

Dr. Alexandrine Guerin  – National Museum of Qatar

Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man – Institute of American Indian Arts: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams – Penn Museum

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This edition of the Museum Series featured a panel of curators that manage the Islamic art collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, the Freer Gallery of Art, and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. This panel was moderated by the Chair of QAIC’s Board of Directors, Peggy Loar. The panel explored the evolution of Islamic art curation in museums today as experts from both the U.S. and Qatar shared their own curatorial processes and approaches towards exhibiting their institution’s Islamic art collections.

The curators featured were the following:

Dr. Navina Najat Haidar, Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah Curator in Charge of the Department of Islamic Art – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dr. Massumeh Farhad, Chief Curator and The Ebrahimi Family Curator of Persian, Arab, and Turkish Art – Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian

Dr. Aimée Froom, Curator of Art of the Islamic Worlds – Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Dr. Linda Komaroff, Curator of Islamic Art and Department Head of Art of the Middle East – Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Dr. Julia Gonnella, Director of the Museum of Islamic Art – Museum of Islamic Art, Doha