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.

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Monir. Lightning for Neda, 2009; Courtesy the Artist and The Third Line

The artist who signs her work simply as “Monir” is a prolific and interdisciplinary figure whose 70-year-plus career is currently being celebrated in a retrospective exhibition curated by Suzanne Cotter at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal. Infinite Possibility–Mirror Works and Drawings is the first museum survey of work produced by the nonagenarian between 1974 and 2014, which will also travel to other venues across the world, beginning with the Guggenheim in New York. Undoubtedly a pioneer, Monir is not only the most renowned, but perhaps also the only practitioner working today in the sphere of mirror mosaics.

Monir melds in her hypnotic hybrid creations the legacy of traditional Iranian architectural adornment with an awareness of the aesthetics of abstraction and minimalism made popular by her friends and contemporaries in New York in the 60s, such as Frank Stella and Robert Morris. The majority of the works selected have been drawn from the artist’s own collection, and have not been exhibited in public since the 70s. Included are early mirror reliefs on plaster and wood – spontaneous, energetic compositions accented with glimpses of nightingales nestling amid florid bouquets of flowers and fragments of broken Qajar paintings behind glass—and a series of large-scale geometric mirror works that formed part of a solo show organised by Denise René at her gallery in Paris in 1977. The exhibition also features previously unseen abstract arrangements on paper—many of which were made in exile in New York in the absence of a proper studio in the years following the 79 Iranian Revolution—a series of heptagonal works, four mirror balls (one of which famously lay atop Andy Warhol’s desk until his death in 1987), and a graduated ziggurat-shaped sculpture of particular architectural beauty.

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