Massumeh Farhad is an American curator, art historian, and author. She is the Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art at the
Freer Gallery of Art
The Freer Gallery of Art is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. focusing on Asian art. The Freer and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. The Freer and Sac ...
and
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery is an art museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., focusing on Asian art. The Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art together form the National Museum of Asian Art in the United States. Th ...
at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Asian Art.
She is known for her work with Persian 17th-century manuscripts.
Biography
Farhad has a PhD (1987) in art history from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
.
In 1997, she had been in a relationship with the Chief Curator of the
National Museum of African Art
The National Museum of African Art is the Smithsonian Institution's African art museum, located on the National Mall of the United States capital. Its collections include 9,000 works of traditional and contemporary African art from both Sub-S ...
, Philip L. Ravenhill (1945–1997) before his death.
She has contributed to the
Encyclopaedia Iranica
An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
.
Farhad has curated numerous exhibitions including the "Art of the Persian Courts" (1996), "The Heroic Past: The Persian
Book of Kings" (2000), "Fountains of Light: The Nuhad Es-Said Collection of Metalwork" (2000), "
Antoin Sevruguin
Antoin Sevruguin ( fa, آنتوان سورگین; 1851–1933) was an Iranian photographer of Armenian-Georgian descent, in Persia during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1785–1925).
Early life
Born into a Russian family of Armenian-Georgian orig ...
and the Persian Image" (2001), "The Adventures of
Hamza
Hamza ( ar, همزة ') () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from ...
" (2002), "Style and Status: Imperial Costumes From Ottoman Turkey" (2005), "Facing East: Portraits from Asia" (2006), "
Falnama: The Book of Omens" (2009),
and "The Art of
Qur’an
The Quran (, ; Standard Arabic: , Quranic Arabic: , , 'the recitation'), also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation from God. It is organized in 114 chapters (pl.: , sing.: ...
: Treasures from the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art" (2016–2017).
Publications
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See also
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Women in the art history field
Women were professionally active in the academic discipline of art history in the nineteenth century and participated in the important shift early in the century that began involving an "emphatically corporeal visual subject", with Vernon Lee as a ...
References
Living people
Date of birth missing (living people)
American curators
Women art historians
American art historians
Harvard University alumni
Smithsonian Institution people
American Iranologists
American Turkologists
American Islamic studies scholars
Year of birth missing (living people)
{{Art-historian-stub