The de-installed former Arts of the Islamic World gallery, May 2013.

We will do our best to keep you updated about the project and how it will affect movement around the Museum with signage. We have already cleared all objects from the former Arts of the Islamic World gallery, and soon you’ll get a behind-the-scenes peek at the project. Objects from the two collections will be on view on storage shelves in that space starting in mid-June. During the first phase of construction, you will be able to walk through this storage area while the adjacent galleries are dark.

This large-scale reinstallation project has also allowed us to collaborate with the Rubin Museum of Art. Museum-goers can see highlights of Asian art from Brooklyn across the East River in the exhibition From India East: Sculptures of Devotion from the Brooklyn Museum, which runs through July 14, 2014. We hope that you will head to Chelsea to learn more about the development of Buddhist and Hindu art across Asia during our temporary closure of the galleries here.

From India East is on view at the Rubin Museum through July 7, 2014 and features Brooklyn Museum objects.

More to come as our opening date gets closer, but we are looking forward to the new galleries. We hope to bring out objects from storage that we couldn’t show in the current galleries, such as Southeast Asian bronzes that require climate control, Japanese scrolls that are too long for the current casework, and an increased number of works on paper from across Asia and the Middle East. It’s a busy but exciting time in my department!

As Lisa mentioned, Othoniel’s work gives us a chance to explore the medium of glass across our diverse collections. While his work is unlike glass from the Islamic world in function and meaning, Othoniel has collaborated with workshops located in centers of glass production that hold particular importance to the medieval Islamic world. Beads in his glass sculptures were produced in Murano, Italy, home of the Venetian glass industry since the late 13^th century. Trade between Venice and the Islamic world, including the transfer of glass objects and technology, has been extensively documented. The glass bricks that form Othoniel’s The Precious Stonewall (2010) were manufactured in Firozabad, India, a center of glass production since the 15^th century that was founded by a Muslim ruler of the Delhi Sultanate.

Mosque Lamp. Egypt or Syria, 13th–14th century. Glass; free blown, applied, enameled, and gilded; tooled on the pontil. Bequest of William H. Herriman, 21.484.

Glassmaking technologies spread across the former Roman Empire, and some methods existed continuously into the Byzantine and early Islamic periods. Things we can sometimes see—a vessel’s shape, decoration, mold marks, imperfections, and pontil scars (left by a glassblowing tool)—can help us figure out how, and perhaps when or where, it was made. This excellent video produced by the Corning Museum of Glass demonstrates the process of free-blown glass, a basic technique used by glassmakers from antiquity to the present. Many of the glass beads and organic forms that make up Othoniel’s sculptures are also free-blown.

This mosque lamp, now on view on the second floor, is one of my favorite examples of a free-blown glass object in our Arts of the Islamic World collection for its enamel decoration. The Mamluk period (1250-1517 C.E.) in Egypt and Syria produced many fine examples of such glass lamps that were commissioned for mosques and charitable foundations. The illuminated glow of the lamp symbolized divine light, and mosque lamps were often inscribed with the well-known Sura of Light from the Qur’an. The inscription that encircles the body of the Brooklyn Museum example, however, repeats the phrase “the learned” in Arabic. Lamps of this type—characterized by a flared neck, a rounded body with handles, and a wide foot—hung from a mosque’s ceiling by chains. After the shape was set, enamel (made from finely crushed glass and an oily medium) was applied with a brush or reed pen, and the vessel was fired. The bottom of the Brooklyn Museum lamp was ground down and a flared pedestal was added at another point, but its intact wick is unusual among extant examples of Mamluk lamps.

Four Bowls. Iran, 11th–12th century. Glass; mold blown. Gift of The Roebling Society, 1991.41.1-.4

Aside from free blowing, another basic glassblowing technique involves blowing molten glass into a mold. These straight-sided round glass bowls in our Arts of the Islamic World collection date to the Saljuq period (1081-1307 C.E.) in Iran. While the four bowls are mold-blown, the transparent and aubergine (1994.41.1, above far left) and cobalt (1994.41.2, above far right and below) bowls were blown into a patterned mold to create a honeycomb pattern on the surface and bottom with a rosette in the center of the bowl.

Bowl. Iran, 11th–12th century. Glass; mold blown. Gift of The Roebling Society, 1991.41.2

The Romans had developed mold-blown glass centuries earlier, and the technique was employed across the Islamic world. These four bowls were probably formed from so-called full-size molds because it appears that their basic shape was not modified after removal from the mold. Molten glass on the end of a blowpipe was blown into a hinged full-size mold, so the pattern of the mold appeared in relief on the glass. The vessel was removed from the mold and finishing touches, such as a rim or handle, were added. The iridescent film now present on surface of these bowls is due to decomposition and previous burial. An acidic environment would cause the certain elements of the glass to undergo a chemical reaction in which the glass would separate into layers, forming a thick iridescent outermost layer subject to flaking.

Free- and mold-blowing are basic techniques for forming glass objects, and both are still in use across the globe today. Even though glass from the Islamic world and Othoniel’s glass sculptures hail from very different moments in time, they were made from the same material and with similar basic techniques.

Installation view of tile panel in Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn.

The tiles in the panel were likely made in Damascus, Syria, an important provincial capital after its conquest by the Ottomans in 1516. Damascene ceramics workshops were influenced by a style of vegetal decoration associated with Iznik, Turkey, a center for ceramic production in the Ottoman Empire, but they adapted color schemes to include cobalt-blue, turquoise, green, and purple. (For an example of Iznik decoration, see this ornament in our Arts of the Islamic World gallery.) Motifs and brushwork on ceramics from Damascus at this time are generally more relaxed than on Iznik examples, where imagery was court-controlled.

We do not know in which building the tiles now at the Brooklyn Museum initially hung. Many buildings from the same period, such as the Darwish Pasha Mosque built by the Ottoman governor, and other museum collections (i.e., The Met and the V&A) include examples of similar tile work.

Darwish Pasha Mosque, Damascus, Syria, 1574, detail of portico showing two tile panels to the west of the entrance (©Michael Greenhalgh, image via Archnet.org)

As Kerith mentioned, the tiles were assembled into a panel upon arrival to the Museum in 1939. Such reconstructions were commonplace during the early 20^th century. Numbers on the tiles and breaks in the decorative scheme suggest a larger original. (Can you spot breaks? It took me awhile at first.) Perhaps damaged tiles were removed and existing ones rearranged, or perhaps the panel includes tiles from various sources. We only know that the tiles came from multiple firing batches due to differences in glazing.

Installation view of “Connecting Places” wall in Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn.

You might assume that all museum objects look now as they did upon creation, but this is often untrue following subsequent interventions. This composite panel is a piece of architecture from Syria that now—approximately 400 years later—functions as a standalone art object on another continent. The reuse of architectural elements has been common throughout Islamic architecture, but they undergo further changes when removed from buildings altogether. Pieces entered European and American collections and museums in the twentieth century, and adjustments occurred for various reasons by those possibly unfamiliar with their original use.

In Connecting Cultures, works are hung in a collage-like formation or “salon hanging.” You get a sense of the panel as an art object conversing with surrounding objects. It appears six feet above the floor on the wall devoted to the theme “Connecting Place”—a completely different placement and environment than in the Darwish Pasha Mosque. In Brooklyn the panel is surrounded by a 17th-century sandstone panel from Mughal India, aTunisian Roman–periodmosaic, and paintings depicting places as diverse as Niagara Falls, Cairo, and Europe.

While these tiles now hang differently than originally intended in a museum far from Damascus, I hope that their inclusion in Connecting Cultures, particularly in relation to the theme of “place,” encourages you to consider the interesting conversation provoked by their proximity to other representations of “place” as well as the significant effects of places—Ottoman Syria, private collection(s), and the Brooklyn Museum—and human agents upon these tiles.