Invisible Hands
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
5:30 PM–7:00 PM
Auditorium
(See the event location map)
Get directions to the Clark
In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Margaret S. Graves (Indiana University / Florence Gould Foundation Fellow) discusses craft skills in the Middle East. These skills are usually portrayed as dying out in the nineteenth century, but were in fact redirected toward a new market generated by the colonial project: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics. By recognizing faking and forgery on the market for Middle Eastern ceramics as skilled forms of craft and as sites of Indigenous participation in global capitalism, this project reveals the challenges that colonial modernity presents to the discipline of art history, via the objects that moved through it and were remade in its image.
Margaret S. Graves is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University in Bloomington. She specializes in the plastic arts of the Islamic world. Her publications include Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as several edited and co-edited volumes on the art and material culture of the Islamic world, including Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022, with Alex Seggerman). At the Clark, Graves is writing a book titled Invisible Hands: Islamic Ceramics and the Colonial Art Market, which discusses modern collecting economies and the craftsmanship of faking in a work.
Presented in person in the Clark's auditorium. Free, with a reception in the Manton Research Center's Reading Room starting at 5 pm. A recorded video of this lecture will be released on the Clark's Youtube channel following the event.
Image left to right: computed tomography (CT) image of Gav (bovine aquamanile) (detail), Iran, late 12th century with modern reconstruction from alien sherds. Eskenazi Museum of Art; studio view of Gav (bovine aquamanile) (detail).
Margaret S. Graves is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University in Bloomington. She specializes in the plastic arts of the Islamic world. Her publications include Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as several edited and co-edited volumes on the art and material culture of the Islamic world, including Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022, with Alex Seggerman). At the Clark, Graves is writing a book titled Invisible Hands: Islamic Ceramics and the Colonial Art Market, which discusses modern collecting economies and the craftsmanship of faking in a work.
Presented in person in the Clark's auditorium. Free, with a reception in the Manton Research Center's Reading Room starting at 5 pm. A recorded video of this lecture will be released on the Clark's Youtube channel following the event.
Image left to right: computed tomography (CT) image of Gav (bovine aquamanile) (detail), Iran, late 12th century with modern reconstruction from alien sherds. Eskenazi Museum of Art; studio view of Gav (bovine aquamanile) (detail).