The Detroit Institute of Arts has been collecting Islamic art for more than a century, and the museum has always had a limited number of works on view. But never has the Islamic gallery been a true curatorial priority or destination within the museum -- until now.
Opening Sunday, the DIA's ambitious new Gallery of Islamic Art, 3,350 square feet on the museum's first floor, displays nearly 170 works from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia and India that span about 1,500 years, from the Seventh through the early 20th centuries. The gallery represents one of the last unfinished projects of the DIA's $158-million renovation and reinstallation that opened in 2007; it took a few extra years to secure the $750,000 needed to finish the gallery. The museum's team -- led by Heather Ecker, curator of Islamic art, who was hired in 2005 to research the collection and oversee the reinstallation -- also needed the time to complete such a comprehensive job. The DIA classifies Islamic art as works created in areas governed by Muslims and where Islamic culture has had a wide influence. The DIA's total holdings of Islamic art number only about 900 pieces. It's a small collection, but it commands respect because of a number of alluring masterpieces, from a 15th-Century Timurid Quran from Iran on colored Chinese paper to an Iznik blue-and-white porcelain charger from Turkey.
Most of the works of art on display are secular (housewares, carpets, etc.), but there also are sacred manuscripts associated with Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The large gaps in the collection have been filled with judicious loans from a variety of national and local sources, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Michigan Special Collections Library. Like the rest of the DIA's collection, the art in the Islamic gallery has been grouped thematically to tell stories. Themes include the Silk Road, carpet weaving, the great empires of the 16th and 17th centuries, medieval housewares and trade, Mediterranean trade and Spanish lusterware from 1250 to 1500, art of the Mamluks and sacred writings. Ecker, who is also the head of the Department of Arts of Asia and the Islamic Word at the DIA, spoke this week about the Islamic collection and reinstallation.
QUESTION: The vast majority of people who visit this gallery will not be familiar with this art, so what are the key ideas that you'd like to communicate to them?
ANSWER: One perception that we would like people to walk away with is that instead of seeing Islamic art as something alien, as something "other," as something that comes from a completely separate set of cultural or intellectual values, (that they) see it as it was -- a vast region that geographically was located at the center of the then-known world and, in fact, was the conduit through which all trade in commerce, luxury goods, in ideas, in technology went from East to West. We want people to see the connections between the Islamic world with almost every other culture.
Q: How might people see those connections?
A: In the first section, "The Silk Road," we have a central case that has a fabulous Ottoman dish next to its Ming inspiration; the visual conversation between the objects is obvious. Those kinds of Ming dishes were made in China specifically for the Middle Eastern market.
We have another vignette about Iznik pottery where we have a bowl painted in this vibrant palette in a style that uses flowers. It was so appreciated and widely exported that it was imitated in Italy, so we have a Paduan imitation and we have a Galician imitation made in Syria and then a late version made in Turkey in the late 17th Century. The design was so appreciated and commercialized it had a more than 100-year run of production.
One of the reasons we wanted to show sacred manuscripts from other traditions in the Islamic world was to show this incredible pluralism that was in the Islamic world at one time. Not only from indigenous groups -- after all, Judaism and Christianity are Middle Eastern religions and always have been -- but also in the pre-modern period you have an incredible absorption of Europeans into the Islamic world either for reasons of trade or diplomacy.
Q: What surprised you about the collection?
A: I had a sense of what was here, but there were some discoveries that we made that were not recognized before. There wasn't a lot of research done on the collection before, so one of the areas I concentrated on was carpets. ... I invited a friend of mine from London who is a well-known expert on carpets to go through the whole collection. We found some great treasures, and we found some other things that are not worthy of a great museum. So we're in the process of de-accessioning those things, which we hope will bring in funds so we can buy another carpet of museum quality.
Q: Does metro Detroit's large Middle Eastern population bestow a special responsibility or importance on the collection?
A: We sometimes have a feeling of exceptionalism in metro Detroit, but there are large populations of Middle Easterners in New York, Washington, Chicago, L.A. But I'm sure when my director (DIA director Graham Beal) thought of creating such an ambitious gallery and hired a curator he had that in mind.
We wanted to create something that would appeal to our local communities, but when we created this gallery, we did keep in mind that it was for everyone. It's not just to respond to the possible interest of one community.
Q: One of the great things about an encyclopedic art museum is that it enriches our humanity by introducing us to the treasures that others have produced.
A: Absolutely. Also, this collection is not predominately art of the Arab world. It takes the view of the Islamic world quite broadly. If I can acquire a beautiful Qur'an from Malaysia, I'll do it. We're interested in the whole spectrum. We do have sections which are from the Arab world, but we also have a lot of things from Iran. Arab art is a subset of Islamic art. The most populous Muslim countries in the world are Indonesia and India.
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