Back in the 1990s, a medieval synagogue ark door from Cairo was sold at a Florida estate auction house. It dated back to the Fatimid period in the 11th century; how the ark made its way from Egypt to America remains unclear. Two institutions jointly acquired the door in 2000: the Yeshiva University Museum and the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore. Now, they are presenting what they are dubbing a “biography” of this special ark door, which was once part of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in an exhibit called Threshold to the Sacred.

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Chances are, if you played a game of word association with “Iran,” you’d get back responses like hostage, theocracy, ayatollah, Persia, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Come September 6th, in the galleries of the Asia Society in New York, a different image of the country will be unveiled in Iran Modern, the first major international loan exhibition of art made there from the 1950s through the 1970s.

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Asheer Akram has used the word “nightmare” more than once the past few minutes. He shakes his head. This project, he tells me, is “the worst idea I ever had.” It’s late August, and I’ve met up with Akram and some of his many collaborators in a garage at 18th Street and Forest. Belger Cartage has provided this indoor space for the finishing work, which has been under way constantly for many days. (Akram has been a resident at Belger Crane Yard Studios on Tracy Avenue for a little more than two years.) For the past four months, Akram says, completing this idea has been a full-time job for seven or eight people, working 16 hours a day. As recently as an August 11 Facebook post, a photo showed what looked almost like a blank canvas. An August 21 Facebook update put out an emergency call for a flower painter.

Read More: Asheer Akram Collaborates to Put His Heritage on Moving Display

Dr. Joseph B. Touma, a successful physician in Huntington, W.V., first became interested in Near Eastern art as a boy in Damascus, Syria. “As I was growing up, I encountered historic monuments on a daily basis,” he said. “After years of attending medical school and training in the United States, I rediscovered the beauty and uniqueness of this art and began collecting, at first slowly. Later, it became my mission to cover all aspects of this diverse art.” Over the years, he and his wife, Dr. Omayma Touma, collected art from the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, North Africa, Moorish Spain and Ottoman Turkey. The Touma Collection, housed at the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, is considered to be one of the nation’s finest collections of Near Eastern art.

Read More: Eastern Treasures Travel to the Jepson