Crossing Disciplines to Rethink the Presentation of Islamic Art

A partnership between UMD faculty in history and art history converges at an international conference connecting scholars, curators, artists and local communities.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Soon after art historian Karin Zitzewitz arrived at the University of Maryland in Fall 2023, historian Peter Wien reached out about working across their disciplines and regions of expertise.

Zitzewitz, chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology, studies the modern and contemporary art of India and Pakistan. Wien, a professor in the Department of History, specializes in the modern Middle East. They soon recognized a shared interest in cultural heritage, and an opportunity to connect areas of scholarship that had rarely intersected at UMD.

Three years later, their partnership has produced its first major public project: a two-day international conference examining how American museums can better engage Muslim and diasporic communities in interpreting Islamic art.

Held September 24 and 25 at UMD and in Baltimore, “From the Balkans to Bengal in Baltimore” will bring together curators and other museum professionals, scholars and artists to consider questions ranging from how museums classify objects and write labels to whose knowledge and experiences shape the stories told in galleries. Speakers will represent institutions including the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin, the New York Public Library, the MSU Broad Art Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s amazing to see a conversation between colleagues grow into such an extraordinary opportunity for our students, faculty and surrounding communities,” said Stephanie Shonekan, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. “This is how our ARHU values come to life—through a project that crosses disciplines, builds connections across institutions and transforms how we think about art and history.”

Initially supported by a 2024 ARHU Harmony Fellowship, Zitzewitz and Wien brought together faculty working in Middle East, North African and South Asian studies, with an emphasis on threats to cultural heritage, such as from armed conflict and war, natural disasters and climate change.

“It was a chance to come out of our silos and establish some sort of a working relationship between history and art history, between the Middle East and South Asia,” Wien said. “I was delighted.”

The collaboration expanded with the 2025 arrival of Sarah Slingluff, a postdoctoral fellow in Islamic art whose previous work at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore—home to one of the richest holdings of Islamic art in the United States—offered an inside view of how museums interpret and present Islamic art. Slingluff has played a key role in planning the conference and connecting its organizers with Islam & Print, a Baltimore-based printmaking fellowship for Muslim artists.

That connection also led to “LANDLINE,” an accompanying exhibition at the University of Maryland Art Gallery curated by Safiyah Cheatam of Islam & Print. Featuring contemporary Muslim artists with connections to Baltimore, Maryland and UMD, the exhibition showcases Muslim creative life in the region today. Open through December 4, it is the first exhibition dedicated solely to Islamic art at UMD.

“‘LANDLINE’ reflects the plethora of experiences of what it means to be Muslim in America and in Maryland specifically,” Slingluff said. “It is colorful and it is bright, and yet there are moments of sadness, of despair. But the big message we’re leading with is joy.”

For conferencegoers, the exhibition helps connect historical works created outside the United States with contemporary art by Muslim artists in the region, Zitzewitz said.

The conference’s keynote speaker, Stefan Weber, directs Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art, home to one of the world’s most significant collections of Islamic art. Following the arrival of large numbers of Syrians in Germany after 2015, Weber helped lead an initiative that trained people from refugee communities to conduct museum tours, combining scholarly information with their personal and cultural perspectives.

“Stefan has been centrally involved in asking how an institution can change the way it engages with both its collections and its communities,” Wien said. 

That work reflects the conference’s central question: What changes when museums recognize that some visitors experience Islamic art not as exotic or unfamiliar, Zitzewitz said, but as part of their daily lives and cultural identities?

“That idea of what belongs and who belongs is really central to what we’re doing,” she said.

After the first day at UMD, the conference will move to Baltimore for programs at the Walters, Islam & Print and the Enoch Pratt Free Library. At the Walters, participants will learn from curator Ashley Dimmig how community members and college students helped write labels for the museum’s Islamic art galleries.

For Wien, the gathering represents a wonderful convergence of the arts and humanities around questions that neither can fully address alone.

“What’s happening here is embodying the soul of our college for these two days,” he said.

Image from “LANDLINE” by Taneen Momeni.