EXHIBIT FOLLOWS IRANIAN ART TO WESTERN COLLECTIONS

Like many American institutions, Bryn Mawr holds a small collection of ceramics and works on paper from medieval Iran. Beginning Sept. 19, a selection of these items will be on display in the Kaiser Reading Room of Rhys Carpenter Library, in an exhibition curated by Bryn Mawr Ph.D. candidate Benjamin Anderson and University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Yael Rice. According to Anderson, the story told by Iranica: Modes of Transmission is about the cultural context that brought such objects into Western collections, rather than the context in which they were produced.

Anderson undertook the project as a summer curatorial fellow, in a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. His second curatorial project at the College, it presented challenges very different from those he faced in last year's "The Invention of Antiquity," which dealt with the emergence of classical studies in early modern Europe.

"Bryn Mawr's collections had everything I could dream of for telling the story of classical studies," Anderson says. "Iran is represented much less comprehensively, and it wouldn't have been possible to present a history of Iranian art with the objects that were available. But they give a very good picture of the history of Western collecting."

In Iranica, three display cases are devoted to three different "modes of transmission" by which Iranian art entered Western collections.

The first case begins with late 19th- and early 20th-century excavations of medieval sites by commercial art dealers — perfectly legal enterprises during that period of Iranian history — and the eventual emergence of scientific, archaeological excavations of such sites.

The second case displays several manuscript illuminations that were excised from manuscripts and sold as individual miniatures, as well as wall tiles that were removed from buildings. "It illustrates how things are extracted from context and turned into art objects in the modernist mold," Anderson explains.

A third case displays three manuscripts that survived intact, with an exploration of the reasons some objects escaped art dealers' scissors and entered Western collections as whole books.

Iranica: Modes of Transmission will be on display Sept. 19 through Dec. 1, in the Kaiser Reading Room on Floor A of the Rhys Carpenter Library. The library hours for the Tri-College community are posted at http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/carpenter.shtml; it is open to the general public from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday.

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