Painted Treasures: The Art of Lacquer
with Maryam Ekhtiar from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Date: Sun, Feb 03, 2019 02:00PM
Price: $20, $18 Friends, $12 students and seniors
Includes same-day Museum admission (redeem at ticket desk)

Explore one of Qajar Iran’s most remarkable art forms with Dr. Maryam Ekhtiar, Persian art specialist from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Persian lacquer painting embellishes the surface of a wide variety of everyday objects, from mirror cases to manuscript covers. This talk will introduce the art of lacquer painting in Iran: its history, unique technique, and rich range of subject matter, with a special focus on a few extraordinary examples from the Museum’s Permanent Collection.

Bio:

Dr. Maryam Ekhtiar is Associate Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Islamic Art, where she has worked for nearly fifteen years. She is a scholar and specialist in the field of later Persian art and culture, with expertise in calligraphy and later Persian painting. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, and she has worked and taught at various museums and universities in the United States, namely the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York University, and Swarthmore College. She was co-editor of and contributor to the 1998 catalogue, Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785-1925. She is co-editor of the catalogues Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art of the Islamic World: A Resource for Educators. She has also published and lectured extensively in the fields of Islamic Art, Iranian art, and contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa. Her latest publication, which was released in August 2018, is a book entitled How to Read the Art of Islamic Calligraphy, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.