NORTHAMPTON, MA.- Smith College Museum of Art is now presenting the exhibition Painting the Persianate World: Portable Images on Paper, Cloth and Clay from February 2–July 7, 2024. Painting the Persianate World showcases the fluidity and transmission of language and culture through images on manuscripts, textiles and ceramics created between the 1300s and 1800s. This exhibition is supported by the Nolen Endowed Fund for Asian Art Initiatives.

Painting the Persianate World introduces a view of cultures in flux through migration and contact. The movement of people from regions that comprise today’s Iran and Afghanistan to present-day Pakistan, India and Bangladesh—and with them the Persian language— formed what has come to be known as the Persianate world. Manuscript illustrations, dye-painted textiles, and decorated ceramics played an important role in binding these regions together. Such highly portable and functional objects visually transported manners of behaving, dressing and eating, as well as storytelling and image making.

This exhibition draws on the combined scholarship of Yao Wu, Jane Chace Carroll Curator of Asian Art at Smith College Museum of Art, and Yael R. Rice, Associate Professor of Art & the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. The exhibition highlights a hidden strength of the SCMA collection, along with objects on loan from the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Sean Kelly Gallery and the Yale University Art Gallery. Learn more about the exhibition here.

The annual Miller Lecture in Art and Art History will be delivered by artist Shahzia Sikander on February 20, 2024 at 5 pm at the Carroll Room, Smith College Campus Center. Two of Sikander’s animations–The Last Post and Reckoning–are featured in the exhibition Painting the Persianate World: Portable Images on Painting, Cloth and Clay. Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian manuscript painting traditions. Sikander will discuss her contemporary practice–which includes painting, sculpture and animation–and the historical influences that inform her work. Learn more here.

SCMA

As a teaching museum affiliated with Smith College, SCMA is dedicated to connecting people to art, ideas and each other by engaging people with firsthand experiences of art, artists and museum practice; collecting, researching, presenting and preserving an expansive collection of art in the service of learning, teaching and critical dialogue; and by fostering an environment that welcomes diverse perspectives and inspires imagination.