Department of Art History

"Inheriting an Invented Tradition: Islamic Art in the Arabian Peninsula."

This talk examines the narrative of Islamic art that is presented in flagship museum collections in the Arabian Gulf, with a focus on the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. The narrative of Islamic art as a cohesive discipline is one that was crafted in the West, based on the Orientalist premise that Islamic cultural production is monolithic, in direct contrast to the diverse complexity of artistic traditions in the West. In this narrative, the Gulf plays little role. Not being a center of a major empire in the pre-modern period, the region does not possess the early architectural or artistic monuments that art historians favor. However, in the twentieth and twenty first century, the center of gravity for collecting and displaying Islamic art, as well as modern and contemporary art of the Middle East, has shifted to the Gulf, which proclaims itself as the inheritor of these traditions, even though none of the canonical works of art were produced there. This paper explores what happens when the problematic stories we tell as art historians become adopted by a country for its own national identity. It argues that in the ongoing quest to find a balance between local and global identities to serve the multi-national populations of the Arabian Gulf, a reliance on Islamic artistic forms shifts the center of gravity in a global historical narrative away from the West toward the Islamic world, thereby fundamentally altering the discourse of Orientalism while relying on its foundational narratives. 

Jennifer Pruitt is the Howard and Ellen Louise Schwartz Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Wisconsin.

Pruitt’s research focuses on architecture in the Arabic-speaking world. her first book, Building the Caliphate: Construction, Destruction, and Sectarian Identity in Early Fatimid Architecture (Yale, 2020), investigates the early architecture of the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shi‘i Muslim dynasty that dominated the Mediterranean world from the 10th to the 12th centuries. It argues that that architecture played a pivotal role in negotiating the kaleidoscope of religious identities in the medieval Islamic world and challenges the assumption that artistic efflorescence was a function of religious tolerance in the medieval Mediterranean. Instead, it argues that conflict and destruction played a crucial, productive role in the formation of medieval Islamic architecture.

She is working currently on a new book project, entitled Inheriting an Islamic Golden Age: Globalism, National Identity, and Invented Histories in the Architecture of the Arabian Gulf. In it, Pruitt investigates the integration of classical forms of Islamic art in the contemporary architecture of the Arabian Gulf, with a focus on the UAE and Qatar. Pruitt’s work has been supported by a First Book Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fulbright, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Institute of Ismaili Studies, and the Center for Advanced Studies in Visual Arts.

The public lecture is sponsored by the Department Art History and generously supported by the Smart Family Foundation.

Reception will follow.

Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact the event sponsor for assistance.