Margaret Graves: Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Medina, Brown University

Historial ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide.  Many migrated westward during the late 19th-/early 20th-century heyday of Islamic art collecting, a time when craft skills in the Middle East were being redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project's fanatical harvesting of artefacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalization of antiquities.  This lecture re-encounters ceramics faking and forgery in the Middle East as a local form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism.