The special exhibition, Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art, showcases dozens of objects from Shangri La, the spectacular Honolulu home Doris Duke built in the mid 1930s and filled with Islamic art until her death in 1993. Featuring artwork from the first through the 20th centuries, Shangri La unfolds organically, much like Duke’s many travels through Muslim countries. The exhibition, which also includes contemporary work by former Shangri La artists-in-residence, is on view from March 21st through July 14th, 2013.

Read More: Exhibition at the Norton Museum

See also: Doris Duke’s Shangri La Museum

The eye in the picture is distracting, alarming, demanding all at once. It’s presumably female – the lashes mascaraed, the eyelids lined, the brows sculpted – and it’s open very wide, as if startled. Her face is no help in reading that emotion: it’s hidden in a dark shadow, the eye spotlighted in a bright circle of light. And then your own eye drifts around the rest of Ahmad Nateghi’s untitled black-and-white photograph and encounters new disorientations. A sliver of a woman’s face smiles in the lower-right corner of a frame, as if she’s peeking through a barely opened door. In the lower-left quadrant, a woman stands with her back to the camera; in front of her, a sign reads “THE PROFESSIONAL CHOICE.”

Read More: Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran

The renovation, expansion, and reinstallation 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: Conservation and Islamic Art, 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.

Read More: Making the Invisible Visible

The International Museum of Women (IMOW) announces the debut of Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices (muslima.imow.org) a groundbreaking international collection of artwork, stories and ideas from contemporary Muslim women. The free online exhibition features exclusive interviews with leading women’s rights advocates from countries including Iran, Afghanistan, and Bosnia and showcases the barrier-breaking creativity of female artists from every region of the world.

Read More: Muslima Online Exhibition

See also: Muslim Women’s Art and Voices

As the curator for the International Museum of Women’s new global exhibition, Muslima: Muslim Women’s Art & Voices, the one question I’m repeatedly asked is, “What common trait do Muslim women artists and leaders around the world share that strikes you?” My answer: their courage.

Read More: Muslim Women’s Art and Voices