Islamic Art Collections

opened its doors to the public. Situated on an expansive 130,000 m2 sea-front site, the centre includes a Natural History Museum, Space Museum, Science Museum and Arabic Islamic Science Museum. Surpassing visitor projections in its first year, the ASCC is quickly becoming a new cultural landmark and platform for cultural revival in Kuwait. The ASCC is part of a cultural regeneration project by Kuwait's Amiri Diwan. This session will look at how the cultural, political, social and education landscape in Kuwait informed the development of the museums for their Kuwaiti visitors. We will look at how the Museum's programmes, events and operations are evolving and the impact ASCC is having on visitors and wider Kuwait society. We hope to identify learning opportunities, both for the Cultural Centre going forward, and for other museums and cultural institutions in the region. Laila Al-Qatami opened the ASCC in 2018 and managed the centre in its year of operation. Prior to this, Laila managed external relations and corporate social responsibility for Gulf Bank-Kuwait. She was a communications and operations strategist for the Executive Office in Diwan of HH The Prime Minister of Kuwait and headed marketing and outreach for the for the National Center for Documentation and Research of the UAE Ministry of

Les arts de l'Islam ont une présence très ancienne en Europe, y compris en France. La mise en place d'un Réseau d' Art Islamique en France (RAIF) coordonné par le département des Arts de l'Islam du musée du Louvre depuis septembre 2016 a permis de mieux cartographier la diffusion de ce patrimoine national. Cependant, les collections des régions sont encore très mal connues et très peu valorisées. Cet atelier vise à présenter quelques collections et oeuvres méconnues et à travers elles, aborder un certain nombre de questions historiques dans une perspective comparative. Par exemple, y at -il différentes histoires des collections, liées à différentes manières de collectionner les arts de l'Islam en France ? Comment la position des arts islamiques at -elle pu varier en fonction des types d'institutions (religieuses, muséales), et dans les musées, des missions de ceux-ci, en particulier ceux à vocation régionale ? Ces différentes positions ont-elles influencé la perception et la définition de ce patrimoine à travers les régions ?

Historiography, increasingly central to Islamic art historical scholarship, has established the critical role art dealers, large-scale exhibitions and prevalent notions of the “Orient” played in the shaping of early private and institutional collections of Islamic art. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Islamic collection, formed in the first half of the twentieth century, owes its existence to Frederick Cleveland Morgan, former MMFA director and an avid art collector involved with the museum in several capacities from 1916 to 1957. Similarly to most North American museum collections of Islamic art, that of the Montreal museum clearly privileges Persian art, particularly twelfth and thirteenth century luxury ceramics. Beyond questions of technical and artistic prowess, the emphasis on Persian art evident in late nineteenth and early twentieth century collections has been attributed to several factors including racial/ist theories, the greater number of Persian artefacts extant, easier access to archaeological sites and material as well as to the important influence of two pivotal figures –both collectors and dealers— in the history of Islamic art in North America, Dikran Kelekian (1887-1951) and Arthur Upham Pope (1881-1969). Cleveland Morgan was a good friend and client of Pope and effectively acquired, akin to numerous other museum directors, a number of the Persian artefacts from him. Using a history of collections approach and drawing upon specific objects and archival material, this paper will contextualize the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Islamic collection by articulating the connections between its making and the production of public and academic conceptions of and attitudes towards Persian art. Exploring the enmeshment of art, economics, ideology and historical discourse, it will, in addition, bring visibility to a largely unpublished and therefore little known collection of Islamic art.