On View this Spring at The San Diego Museum of Art
Ladan Akbarnia, Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art
It has been a while since our last update, but much is happening at the San Diego Museum of Art! Last year, SDMA and the Museum of Photographic Arts merged to become SDMA and SDMA@MOPA. As a result of this expansion, SDMA is delighted to have welcomed Dr. Kara Felt as its new Laurence S. Friedman Curator of Photography in late March. The Museum also hosted a major exhibition of Korean art, Korean in Color: A Legacy of Auspicious Images, last fall. Host-curated by SDMA’s Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Dr. Rachel Jans, the exhibition featured large-scale contemporary works in dialogue with selected masterpieces from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Museum has also been busy “off campus,” organizing major exhibitions of masterpieces from its renowned permanent collections of South Asian and European art. India: South Asian Paintings from the Edwin Binney 3rd Collection, organized by Dr. Ladan Akbarnia, Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, opened at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, on February 16. It will be on view there through May 12, 2024, having completed its inaugural tour at Madrid’s CentroCentro in 2023. Emulation and Admiration: Two Stories of Collecting European Art, organized by Dr. Michael Brown, Curator of European Art, will travel to Tokyo and Kyoto in Japan in 2025. Finally, O’Keeffe & Moore, organized by Anita Feldman, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, is currently on tour at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2025.
Back “on campus” in Balboa Park, the San Diego community is invited to come see our newly installed Art of the Americas galleries (Galleries 1–3), a new rotation of Indian paintings in Pearls from the Ocean of Contentment (Gallery 12 North), and another newly acquired Shahnameh print by artist Hamid Rahmanian. And the countdown has officially begun to Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World, our major fall exhibition, opening on September 7 and on view through January 5, 2025, before traveling to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in February 2025. Featuring works from over forty lenders from the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia—and a wealth of art and material culture from Iran and by Iranian contemporary artists—Wonders of Creation is supported by grants from the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and San Diego County, as well as by Bank of America and individual donors. If you are interested in supporting Wonders of Creation, please contact Ladan Akbarnia or the Development Office at SDMA.
