A Chini Khana in Boston: Experimenting with the Display of Persian Ceramics
A Chini Khana in Boston: Experimenting with the Display of Persian Ceramics
Chair: Professor Charles Melville, BIPS President
In mid-2019 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opened a re-installed gallery for the Arts of Islamic Cultures. Each of the eight small spaces making up the gallery was designed to be a modular unit, a platform for experimentation with display and interpretation that could easily be changed to try something new. The most unusual of these rooms required the construction of a mock chini-khana for a ceramics display.
In this talk Laura Weinstein speaks about the daunting yet exciting process of developing this installation, the issues it was designed to tackle, and the questions she still grapples with as the display nears the end of its second year.
About the speaker:
Laura Weinstein is Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Since arriving at the MFA in 2009 she has lead the reinstallation of the Museum’s South Asian & Southeast Asian (2011) and Islamic art (2019) collections and curated several exhibitions of Islamic and South Asian art, including a touring exhibition of the highlights of the MFA’s collection of Arts from Islamic Cultures. She is the author of Ink, Silk & Gold: Islamic Art from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015); Megacities Asia (2016); MFA Highlights: Arts of South Asia (2020), and a range of scholarly publications dealing with illustrated Persian manuscripts and the collecting of Indian and Islamic art.
Watch the video on our YouTube channel.
