Mention art and antiquities, and the typical Western mind might picture a Greek statue, stained glass, Egyptian sarcophagi, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—things that are often large or heavy and can break, crack, fade, or lose heads throughout time. But what’s featured in the McClung Museum’s exhibition Splendid Treasures of the Turkomen Tribes From Central Asia, on display through May 12th, 2013 is entirely portable.

Read More: McClung Museum Celebrates Turkomen Decorative Art

See also: Treasures of Turkoman Tribes

Lovers of pottery and ceramics of all kinds will no doubt find a favorite or two among the 60 incredible examples of early Persian pots that will be on display in the exhibit A Kind of Alchemy: Medieval Persian Ceramics.

Read More: A Kind of Alchemy

See also: Medieval Persian Ceramics at the Frick

Nearly 60 years after her death, acclaimed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is the inspiration for an exhibition of drawings which opened February 23rd at Promenade Gallery in Lakeview, Mississauga. Drawing Women features about 18 drawings by five South Asian artists: Reeta Saeed, Sumaira Tazeen Sheikh, Kanchan Raste, Asma Mahmood and her daughter, Bushra Mahmood. Saeed and Sheikh are both graduates of the National College of Arts Lahore in Pakistan, majoring in the traditional technique of miniature painting.

Read More: Exhibit Features Miniature Paintings

The Frick Art & Historical Center announces the opening of A Kind of Alchemy: Medieval Persian Ceramics, a rich and colorful exhibition of more than 60 objects made between the 10th and 14th centuries in Persia (what is now present-day Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan). Recognized today as one of the major artistic expressions from the lands of Islam, medieval Persia’s beautifully decorated luxury ceramics have been prized by collectors over the centuries, but little-known by the general public. The exhibition opened at The Frick Art Museum on February 23rd, 2013 and will remain on view through June 16th, 2013.

Read More: Medieval Persian Ceramics at the Frick

The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces is a traveling exhibition and varied discourse attempting to investigate the veil in its broadest and most universal context. The work included in this exhibition, which continues through to March 8th, 2013 at the Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College, intends to engage current clichés and stereotypes and to reflect on the great ubiquity, importance, and profundity of the veil throughout human history and imagination.

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The renovation, expansion, and re-installation between 2003 and 2011 of the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art provided conservators and conservation scientists with an extraordinary opportunity to examine and conserve many works of Islamic art in the permanent collection. Discoveries that were made during this period have enhanced many aspects of the re-installation of the galleries. The exhibition Making the Invisible Visible, on view beginning April 2nd, 2013, will demonstrate how our understanding and appreciation of the works of art we see in visible light can be augmented by information gleaned using other wavelengths of light, from infrared to x-rays.

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In Harmony showcases some 150 works from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art. Largely unpublished and little known, the collection includes important objects from the Persian cultural sphere, such as luxury glazed ceramics of the early Islamic era, illustrated manuscripts of medieval epic poems, and lacquerware of the early modern era. Among the manuscripts are folios of the Shahnama, by Firdawsi, and the Khamsa, by Nizami.

Read More: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art

See also: Pearls of Persian Art

Among the roughly 170 pieces of Islamic art that Norma Jean Calderwood and her husband left to Harvard, one in particular hints at the late collector’s philosophy: an earthenware bowl bearing, in precise calligraphy, the epigram “Greed is a sign of poverty.” In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art, which opens January 31st, 2013 at the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, is both a celebration of Calderwood’s championship of once-obscure work and a showcase of the vibrancy of Iranian culture over time.

Read More: Pearls of Persian Art

See also: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art

Radical Terrain, which continues to the end of April 2013 at the Rubin Museum of Art, is the last of three small, carefully judged, back-to-back exhibitions in the series Modernist Art From India. How lucky New York is to have a museum willing and able to do such shows, unfamiliar in content but large with history. If we relied on our big institutions, which so often spoon-feed us what we already know, we would be unaware that India even had a modern art, never mind one of variety and complexity.

Read More: South Asia Through Modernist Binoculars

Islamic masterworks from Kuwait’s renowned al-Sabah Collection will be exhibited, beginning January 26th 2013, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as part of a long-term collaboration with the cultural institution Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah (DAI). The privately held al-Sabah Collection is one of the greatest collections of Islamic art in the world, and the partnership initiates a historic exchange of objects, staff, and expertise.

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The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross will feature an exhibition of Southeast Asian textiles titled Transnational Ikat: An Asian Textile on the Move from January 24th to March 1st, 2013.

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On January 1st 2013, the Virginia-based Hermitage Art Gallery rang in the New Year with an exhibit dedicated solely to contemporary Iranian art. Curated from the collection of gallery owners Mehri and Nasser Hosseini, the exhibition features more than 40 works of modern art by seven Iranian artists.

Read More: Generations of Modern Iranian Art

There is plenty of historical evidence that Ethiopian traders traveled to India as early as 2,000 years ago. A new exhibition at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture entitled Africans in India: From Slaves to Generals and Rulers, shows that there was another wave of Africans who arrived in India beginning in the 1100s both as free and enslaved people, among them Ethiopians.

Read More: The History of Africans in India

Elaborate silver, gilt jewelry, carpets, and textiles from the Turkomen tribes of Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan are the focus of a new exhibit, which opens January 18th, 2013 at the Frank H. McClung Museum, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Read more: Treasures of Turkoman Tribes