2008 Woodie Awards
Miami art galleries showcase collections on social injustice
Ellen Winternheimer
Issue date: 10/12/07 Section: Campus
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According to the director of the art museum, Bob Wicks, with more than 800 students using the artwork for classroom analysis, the museum's goal is to push the viewer into questioning how he or she would respond to the situations that so many people are experiencing the Middle East.
"Natalie Marsh, the former curator of collections for the art museum, was in charge of determining how the Miami University Art Museum would respond to the issue of social injustice," Wicks said. "The result was several collections of jewelry, rugs, paintings, poems and sculptures that were the effects of war and discrimination in many Middle Eastern countries."
The exhibits have been available since Sept. 7 and will continue through Dec. 15.
The first gallery is a collection of Central Asian jewelry from a private collector who lives in the Oxford area. Wicks explained that this gallery is supposed to cue the audience to think about how we present ourselves through the art we create, which in this case is exquisite metal and stone jewelry.
The second gallery displays a number of Persian and Indian paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries titled, "Of Poems, Of Legends."
According to the "Of Poems, of Legends" arts booklet, this period in history was an important time of cultural interchange. The Persian paintings were influenced by the Mongol invasion near and in the Middle East, forcing a split of the Abbasid Empire, which was prominent in encouraging the rise of the Persian and Mughal culture. The consequence was a long period of changes in dynasties that resulted in invasions from other regions, slave uprisings and religious conflict. The Mughal Empire, on the other hand, began in Central Asia and forced its way into what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The leader, Akbar, supported working side-by-side with Persians, Hindus and Muslim Indians to develop unique Mughal paints and manuscripts.
Wicks said this gallery displays the importance of storytelling and how it is taken from manuscript and represented in picture form. It also disproves the common conception that Islamic culture forbids the creation of human images.
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