LACMA

Ahmanson, Level 4: Artworks on view

The museum houses a highly significant collection of Islamic art. These widely diverse arts, from an area extending from southern Spain to Central Asia, trace the distinctive visual imagination of Islamic artists over a period of fourteen hundred years. The collection consists of over 1,700 works, of which some 150 examples are on view; these include glazed ceramics, inlaid metalwork, enameled glass, carved wood and stone, and manuscript illustration, illumination, and calligraphy.

Tunisia, probably Qairawan

LACMA’s Collectors Committee Acquires Six Works

April 19, 2010

Samira Alikhanzadeh, Untitled, 2009. Iranian artist Alikhanzadeh’s work focuses on found images of women from the mid-1930s, a period when Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1921–41) led a reform movement to bring women and minorities in Iran into the mainstream, including the compulsory uncovering of women. This was the first generation of Iranian women who were free to appear uncovered in public and in photographs. As curator Linda Komaroff explains, Alikhanzadeh’s untitled work “includes small shards of mirror allowing the viewer (perhaps, ironically, an Iranian woman now decreed by law to wear hejab) to identify more closely with the nameless girls and women dressed in their once fashionable clothes.”

Shadi Ghadirian Refashions the Tutu

March 12, 2009

During a trip to Europe, Nasser al-Din Shah, the Qajar dynasty ruler of Iran during the second half of the nineteenth century, attended a ballet performance and found himself captivated by the ballerina’s costumes. He returned home with a prototype in mind. While ballerinas graced the stages of Paris on point, clad in opaque tights and tulle tutus, offstage in Qajar Iran, woman of the Shah’s harem were provided with a reinvented tutu, fitted to their modest haute couture desires hundreds of miles away. Contemporary Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian captures this unique twist of style in her Qajar Series (1998), on view on the top floor of the Ahmanson Building through the end of this month.

The Painstaking Process of Tying 15.5 Million Knots

December 8, 2009