Events: Discovering the Arts of Persian Lands

Event Description

This six-week online course accompanies the exhibition Bestowing Beauty: Masterpieces from Persian Lands, offering an introduction to Persian art with examples from this extraordinary and wide-ranging collection. Each week will center on one of the six exhibition themes, among which Faith and Piety are expressed through a Qur’an page from the first centuries of Islam, Banquets and Battles through illustrations to the Iranian national epic the Shahnama, and Earth and Nature through a monumental carpet woven in a fantastical garden theme.

Participants will gain a better understanding of the rich artistic traditions of Iran and its neighboring lands and an opportunity to engage with the exhibition objects on a deeper level.
This course will take place on Tuesdays via Zoom.

About Your Instructor

Margaret Squires is a PhD candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where her research focuses on the history of the Persian carpet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a BA in Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures from the University of Virginia. From 2017 to 2020, she worked in the Art of the Islamic Worlds department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, first as a graduate fellow and then as curatorial assistant. During her time there, she played an active role in preparations for the Bestowing Beauty exhibition and contributed to the accompanying catalogue. She speaks Arabic and French and is learning Farsi.

If you have questions, please email evelyn.newsome@high.org.