“HomeGround: Contemporary Art from the Barjeel Foundation” is a testimony to the heterogeneous ways that themes of diaspora, immigration, violence, and belonging can be imagined. The exhibit, located at the Aga Khan Museum, mobilizes a wealth of mediums, ranging from film, to paint, to sculpture, by twelve artists of middle eastern descent. The artists, according to curator Suhelya Takesh, are “striving for an ability to remain in place, for the rights to travel, to emigrate, to return, or to feel at home.” Takesh wants guests to note the relationship between geography and self-fashioning.

Read More: Homeward Ground

An imaginary building to house the Palestinian State, birds that need a permit to fly and a request for citizenship of a country that does not yet exist — these are some of the thought-provoking concepts presented in an exhibition hosted by the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada, in collaboration with the Sharjah-based Barjeel Art Foundation. The show, titled “Home Ground: Contemporary Art from the Barjeel Art Foundation”, features important works by 12 leading Arab artists born in the Middle East and North Africa.

Read More: Contemporary Art from Middle East, North Africa

The Deccan plateau of south-central India was home to a succession of highly cultured Muslim kingdoms with a rich artistic heritage. Under their patronage in the 16th and 17th centuries, foreign influences-notably from Iran, Turkey, eastern Africa, and Europe-combined with ancient and prevailing Indian traditions to create a distinctive Indo-Islamic art and culture. Opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 20, the landmark exhibition Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy will bring together some 200 of the finest works from major international, private, and royal collections.

Read More: Metropolitan Museum of Art to Display Sultans of Deccan India Exhibit

See also: Metropolitan Museum of Art Will Celebrate Deccan Sultanate’s Golden Age

The most extraordinary thing about the exhibition, “Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy”, that opens next month [April 20] at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (popularly known as “the Met”) is that it’s happening at all. As historians know well, the output of the five sultanates of the Deccan that flourished between the late 15th and the late 17th century, well before the princely state of Hyderabad came into being, was dazzling. The world’s earliest diamonds were mined in this region, of which the finest came to adorn European, Ottoman and Mughal royalty. Its prized painted and dyed textiles went westwards to Europe and eastwards to Southeast Asia. The Deccan courts attracted Persian painters, European traders, Portuguese doctors, Maratha warriors and military slaves from Ethiopia, who, unusually, came to enter the nobility.

Read More: Metropolitan Museum of Art Will Celebrate Deccan Sultanate’s Golden Age

Stepping off the fourth-floor elevator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a visitor’s first encounter is a row of fluorescent neon signs that create intricate Arabic script. These signs are the beginning of a new exhibit, “Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East.” With LACMA’s impressive permanent collection of traditional Islamic art which is one of the most extensive collections in the United States now on an extended tour, the exhibit of modern Middle Eastern art has opened in its place.

Read More: LACMA Gives Look at History of Islamic Art

Two new exhibitions, distinct but connected by one man’s passion for India, open to the public starting Saturday, February 21 at the Aga Khan Museum. One of the exhibitions called the “Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin” features 60 historical works from the British artist’s personal collection. The other exhibition to be displayed in tandem is called “Inspired by India: Paintings by Howard Hodgkin”, which features eight of Hodgkin’s expressive paintings.

Read More: Indian Influence in New Exhibit at Aga Khan Museum

A new exhibition at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute Museum will offer a glimpse into everyday life in a lively, multicultural city in ancient Egypt. “A Cosmopolitan City: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Old Cairo” features many objects that have never been displayed in the museum before and shows how people of different faiths interacted to create a vibrant society. The exhibition is on view from Tuesday, February 17 through September 13 [2015]. The exhibition sheds light on Egypt in the time between the pharaohs and the modern city, roughly 650–1170 AD, when the main population lived in the area known as Fustat, located in today’s southern Cairo.

Read More: Exhibition Shows How Christians, Muslims, Jews Created Vibrant Society in Medieval Cairo

Iran’s Women Police Academy had existed for just two years in 2005 when Iranian artist Abbas Kowsari went to photograph a graduation ceremony. The women wore hijabs as they did things such as scaling walls, which is what they’re doing in the Kowsari photo on view in LACMA’s “Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East”. Kowsari had to ask permission to take the photo, and it has an understated feeling: Four staggered figures in flowing black robes look as if they’re almost floating up a brick and concrete wall.

Read More: Most Museums See the Middle East as a Place of Relics, LACMA Sees it as a Place for New Art

Geometric Aljamia: A Cultural Transliteration transforms the Malinda Jolley Mortin Gallery of Kennesaw State University’s Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum into a place of quiet, and sometimes disconcerting, beauty [through February 21, 2015]. The exhibition’s title is instructive. The very idea of transliteration, the linguistic term for letters or words made from a different alphabet or language, is critical to understanding this show of work by six artists with multicultural backgrounds. The Spanish word aljamía is itself a transliteration of Arabic letters, words and Moorish texts written in Iberian Romance languages in Arabic script.

Read More: Contemplative, Culture-Crossing Work in “Geometric Aljamia” at Zuckerman

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Islamic Art Now: Contemporary Art of the Middle East, opening Feb. 1, 2015, the first major exhibition of LACMA’s holdings of Middle Eastern contemporary art — the largest such institutional collection in the United States. In recent years, the parameters of Islamic art have expanded to include contemporary works by artists from or with roots in the Middle East. Drawing inspiration from their own cultural traditions, these artists use techniques and incorporate imagery and ideas from earlier periods. LACMA has only recently begun to acquire such work within the context of its holdings of Islamic art, understanding that the ultimate success and relevance of this collection lies in building creative links between the past, present, and future.

Read More: First Major Exhibition of LACMA’s Middle Eastern Contemporary Art Collection Opens February 1, 2015

As though ruby eyes and diamond teeth were not enough to make the small gold head of a tiger truly shine, the goldsmith dotted its face with yet more gemstones and encircled its neck with emeralds and more rubies. Made about 1790, it is among the older pieces on display in “Treasures from India: Jewels from the Al-Thani Collection,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By contrast, in one of the exhibition’s most recent pieces, diamonds cluster in a 2013 Cartier necklace with a 57-carat, drop-shape pendant, its platinum settings virtually invisible — all the eye registers is the liquid beauty of flawless stones. Woven into the dense fabric of history that separates these two works is a story of jewels and jewelry not just from India (as the show’s title states) but also for and inspired by India.

Read More: A Trove Both Precious and Powerful

Hear the word “Islam” these days and, for many, visions of beheadings, demagogic mullahs, hollow-eyed refugees and gun-toting jihadis are almost sure to follow. While hardly fair or truthful, this mental slide show is nevertheless an understandable result of the way Islam, or at least acts perpetrated by some in the name of Islam, is portrayed via the 24/7 news cycle. It was something of a balm, then, to visit the recently opened Aga Khan Museum in North Toronto the other day for a tour of its newest exhibition. “The Lost Dhow: A Discovery from the Maritime Silk Route” presents more than 300 artifacts from a cache of more than 50,000 recovered in 1998 from the remains of a ninth-century Arab dhow found at the bottom of the Java Sea.

Read More: The Lost Dhow

See also: Shipwreck Treasure Exhibit at Aga Khan Museum

Artifacts from the earliest and most significant Arab shipwreck discovered will be on display during an exhibit at the Aga Khan Museum. “The Lost Dhow: A Discovery From the Maritime Silk Route”, will be held at the Wynford Drive museum December 19 [2014] to April 26 [2015], marking its North American premiere. Jointly organized by the Asian Civilisations Museum of Singapore, the Singapore Tourism Board, and the Aga Khan Museum, the exhibit of ninth-century Chinese artifacts offers a glimpse of rare Tang dynasty objects from the shipwreck found in Southeast Asia in 1998.

Read More: Shipwreck Treasure Exhibit at Aga Khan Museum

When the famed calligrapher Mir Emad was murdered at the Safavid court in 1615 – perhaps on account of artistic rivalry or perhaps because of his religious affiliations – an important chapter in the history of the calligraphic script known as nasta’liq came to a close. Mir Emad was not the originator of nasta’liq, which emerged in 14th century Iran as a likely marriage of two other styles (nashk and ta’liq), but he was nonetheless largely regarded as its undisputed master, attracting admirers among his Safavid patrons, Mughal emperors in South Asia, and countless others even long after his death.

Read More: Persian Letters

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is organising a major exhibition on the Seljuks, whose medieval Islamic empire expanded from central Asia into much of modern Anatolia in Turkey, without loans from Turkey, The Art Newspaper has learned. Experts fear that loans from any collections in Iran or Russia will also be missing in the Met’s show.

Read More: No Turkish Loans for Big Seljuk Turk Show Planned by the Met

Infrequent are the times in Washington, DC when the name ‘Iran’ is uttered outside discourses revolving around security and politics. The country has come to be defined by the ongoing circuit of think tank events and publications that grapple with Iran’s role in the world, and the piling up of congressional resolutions in response to its nuclear programme. Washington-Tehran relations are framed by some of the iconic sights of the US capital’s past and present, such as photographs of Jimmy Carter and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on the White House lawn wiping their eyes (as a result of the tear gas intended to fend off nearby protesters), and the dull, turquoise dome of the deserted Iranian embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. The Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art at the Smithsonian, in focusing on Iran’s cultural heritage, have offered a refreshing, alternative perspective on Iran for US audiences, amidst geopolitical sturm und drang. The ongoing exhibition,Feast Your Eyes: A Taste for Luxury in Ancient Iran includes gilded and silver rarities from Iran’s pre-Islamic past, and serves as a reminder of the rich cultural heritage of the Iranian people and their engagement with elements beyond uranium. Joining the Freer and Sackler Galleries in highlighting Iran’s cultural achievements in Washington, DC is an exhibition at the Library of Congress entitled A Thousand Years of the Persian Book. Running through September 20, 2014, the exhibition has also been accompanied by a series of lectures by internationally-renowned scholars on Persian literature, culture, and heritage.

Read More: A Thousand Years of the Persian Book

See also: The World as Scripted in Persia

Too often the Middle East is reduced to just that: the “Middle East” — a blanket term defining a large swath of territory in Western Asia and North Africa, a news-hour shorthand for territorial conflicts and civil unrest. But “Middle East” does little to define the diversity of a region made up of nearly 20 countries, a dozen languages, myriad cultural traditions and several millennia of history. A series of exhibitions scheduled to land in Los Angeles starting in September should help open some minds. The Los Angeles/Islam Arts Initiative (LA/IAI), led by the Department of Cultural Affairs, will bring together nearly 30 cultural institutions in the L.A. area to stage exhibitions and events that will tell the story of Islamic art around the world.

Read More: How Los Angeles’s Islamic Art Shows Might Expand Our ‘Middle East’ Vision

Mughal Painting: Power and Piety at Foster Galleries at the Seattle Asian Art Museum presents works of art created in India under the Mughals, from 1526 to 1857. The artwork on display is predominantly miniature painting, which fuses Indian and Persian styles. The court’s finest artists worked on several hundred such pieces on paper, during the course of the empire. However, only a few have been preserved to the present day. The paintings predominantly depict the victories, battles and daily lives of the royalty.

Read More: Seattle Asian Art Museum Exhibit Features Mughal Paintings

The New Museum presents Here and Elsewhere, the first museum-wide exhibition in New York City to feature contemporary art from and about the Arab world. The exhibition brings together more than forty-five artists from over fifteen countries, many of whom live and work internationally. In keeping with the New Museum’s dedication to showcasing the most engaging new art from around the globe, Here and Elsewhere is the most recent in a series of exhibitions that have introduced urgent questions and new aesthetics to US audiences. “This exhibition continues the New Museum’s commitment to looking at art from beyond the confines familiar to the New York art world,” said Massimiliano Gioni, Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions. “Here and Elsewhere brings new works and new voices to our audiences, presenting many artists who are showing in New York for the first time.” Combining pivotal and under-recognized figures with younger and midcareer artists, Here and Elsewhere works against the notion of the Arab world as a homogenous or cohesive entity. Through the original and individualized practices of a multigenerational constellation of artists, the exhibition highlights works that often have conceptual or aesthetic references to the Arab world, yet also extend well beyond.

Read More: New Museum Presents an Exhibition of Contemporary Art From and About the Arab World

‘There is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” Thomas Jefferson penned these words on Sept. 21, 1814, just weeks after British troops had set fire to the U.S. Capitol, reducing its library to ashes. Jefferson had compiled a personal library over 50 years and was now exploring selling much of it to the government to replace Congress’s — and the nation’s — loss. Lest anyone think the books’ range too broad for politicians, Jefferson argued, “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection.” Two centuries later, a series of exhibitions illustrates the extent to which the Library of Congress has embraced Jefferson’s philosophy. After shows that highlighted American, Armenian and Hebraic books, we now have A Thousand Years of the Persian Book.

Read More: The World as Scripted in Persia

Cairo Under Wraps: Early Islamic Textiles, a Centennial exhibition opening at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) on June 21, 2014, highlights the ROM’s collection of early Islamic textiles, dating largely from the 8th to 12th centuries. More than half of the exhibition’s approximately 80 fabrics are on public display for the first time and many of the oldest were collected by C.T. Currelly, the ROM`s founding director. These rare, delicate objects are displayed alongside ceramics, glass, metalwork and coins from the ROM’s permanent collection of Islamic art.

Read More: Early Islamic Textiles to Feature Rare Fabrics at Royal Ontario Museum