Talk by Margaret Graves (History of Art and Architecture, Brown University)

Historical ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide. Many migrated westward during the turn-of-the-twentieth-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 fictionalizing of antiquities. This lecture re-encounters ceramics faking and forgery in the Middle East as a form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism that was capable of creating stunning new objects of encounter. These fictionalized objects married manual and cerebral ingenuity to generate new objects of delight for elite collectors, in an environment where the structures of antiquities collection derive ultimately from both colonial-era resource extraction and the structures of international banking.

Margaret Graves is a specialist in the art of the Islamic world, with a particular research focus on the plastic arts (ceramics, metalwork, and stone carving) and the acts and contexts of making in the medieval and modern eras. Her first monograph, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam (Oxford University Press, 2018), looked at medieval artworks that make formal and conceptual allusions to architecture, placing these acts of material allusion into medieval Islamic intellectual history. Arts of Allusion won the 2019 book prize of the International Center of Medieval Studies and the 2021 Karen Gould prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Her new book, Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, February 2026), explores the craft skills of ceramics faking and forgery for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century antiquities market. Other ongoing research topics include contemporary art that explores the legacies of colonial-era craft reform and heritage management in the Middle East; locating a global “golden age” of faking for the international antiquities market; and collaborations with conservators on the material lives of doctored objects.