SDMA awarded $60K from the National Endowment for the Arts
Ladan Akbarnia
The San Diego Museum of Art rang in the new year with exciting news of an important grant for two art commissions by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Museum was approved for a $60,000 “Grants for Arts Projects” award toward support for art commissions by two California-based artists for SDMA’s 2024 summer exhibition, Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World. Kurdish-Iraqi American Hayv Kahraman and Iranian American Ala Ebtekar, who spoke recently about his artistic practice with curator Ladan Akbarnia as part of the SDMA’s Docent Lecture Series, will produce works conceived for the exhibition’s narrative about the intersections of art and science in the Islamic world. The commissioned works will ultimately become acquired by the Museum as part of the permanent collection.
Inspired by her research-based practice and attention to issues of gender, narrative, memory, and exile in diasporic cultures, SDMA will commission Kahraman to produce a work or small series of works in dialogue with surviving pages from the 13th-century cosmosgraphy by Persian scholar al-Qazwini, which inspired the exhibition’s title. A work by Ebtekar, whose similarly research-based practice layers different materials, techniques, and traditions to explore scientific traditions associated with Islamic discourse, will be commissioned for the exhibition’s second section on scientific processes and innovations. Kahraman and Ebtekar often integrate historical texts written by medieval Muslim scholars and polymaths on topics such as cosmology, astronomy, geometry, and Sufism, each of which belongs to the wide spectrum of sciences addressed in Wonders of Creation. 
Hayv Kahraman, Decagram 2, 2013. Corporeal Mapping series. Oil on panels, 46 x 46 inches. ©Hayv Kahraman.
Ala Ebtekar, Zenith VIII, 2021. Acrylic over cyanotype exposed to sunlight on canvas; quadriptych, 72 x 145 inches. On loan to SDMA by artist.©Ala Ebtekar.
While their layered, multimedia work is steeped in extensive historical research that often draws from Arabic and/or Persian literature, both artists simultaneously engage the present through issues that cross cultural and sociopolitical boundaries. Kahraman weaves personal experience into traditional Islamic visual frameworks to address gender, narrative, and cultural memory in exile, while Ektebar employs modern technologies such as cyanotype exposure on printed book pages to juxtapose Islamic optic and metaphysical theories with local and contemporary issues relevant to his identity as both an Iranian and an American. Situated in the diaspora, both artists have established reputations in the field of contemporary Middle Eastern art, but their work belongs equally to any history of contemporary, American, or Californian art and visual culture.
Wonders of Creation is also supported by The Getty Foundation as a grantee of its Pacific Standard Time initiative, which brings diverse organizations together by providing generous funding toward projects and programs responding to a special theme. In 2024, the theme will be Art x Science x LA. Additional support for the research phase has come from Fred and Diana Elghanayan. Historic objects as well as contemporary art from Iran and the Iranian diaspora will feature prominently in the exhibition, and a special collaboration with the Balboa Art Conservation Center (BACC), located just around the corner from SDMA in Balboa Park, will focus on scientific research through a case study of 10–12 Indian and Persian paintings from the Museum’s renowned Edwin Binney 3rd Collection. Stay tuned for more news about the upcoming exhibition as we continue preparations in the next two years!
Ladan Akbarnia, Ph.D., Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, The San Diego Museum of Art
(Twitter @LadanAkbarnia)
