Today from our friends at REORIENT, we bring you an excerpt from Nicola Baird’s review of Islamic Art Now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Baird notes that “the dialogue surrounding the validity of the term ‘Islamic’ as a meaningful art-historical classification continues to attract attention. Indeed, what is Islamic art, and is such a term appropriate?” This article was originally published on February 16, 2015.

Abdullah Al Saab. Technology Killed Reality, 2014. Courtesy of the Artist, Tamara Keleshian, and Museum Associates/LACMA. Photograph © Djinane AlSuwayeh.

Currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is Islamic Art Now, the first major exhibition showcasing the museum’s impressive collection of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African art, and the largest of its kind in the United States. Featuring twenty-five works in a range of differing media, including photography, sculpture, video, and installation art by twenty artists from Iran and the Arab world, such as Wafaa Bilal, Lalla Essaydi, Hassan Hajjaj, Mona Hatoum, and Shirin Neshat, Islamic Art Now can be seen to constitute, in the words of CEO Michael Govan and Director Wallis Annenberg, the “contemporary counterpart to LACMA’s world-renowned historical Islamic art collection,” as well as demonstrate the profound connection between the past and the present.

LACMA houses one of the most significant collections of “Islamic” art in the world, consisting of more than 1,700 works, including (but not limited to) glazed ceramics, enamelled glass, inlaid metalwork, and illustrated and illuminated manuscripts from southern Spain to Central Asia. The museum began to concentrate seriously on the arts of the Islamic (for lack of a better term) world in 1973 with the acquisition of the Nasli M. Heeramaneck Collection, during a time of rapid change and growth in the study of Islamic art. By 1972, thirteen professors and seven curators of Islamic art had been appointed at American institutions; less than two decades prior to this, only one full-time teaching position existed, with just four curators in employment across the entire country. Cultural and charitable establishments responded to the sudden escalation of Western interest in the Middle East, and in 1975, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its original suite of galleries for the display of North America’s largest and most important collection of Islamic art. The following year, London hosted the inaugural World of Islam Festival, a program of exhibitions and events designed to introduce Islamic culture in its aesthetic, scientific, technological, musical, and intellectual entirety to the West.

Read the full article here.