Mapping the history of Islamic art exhibitions in the United States

The United States, with its many important collections and active support for scholarship, has a long tradition of exhibiting art of the premodern Islamic world. Yet, no comprehensive attempt to chronicle the history of these exhibitions or their geographic distribution has been made. This paper presents an open-source dataset of all temporary exhibitions of premodern Islamic art in America from 1914 to 2020 and preliminary findings that deepen our understanding of the display of Islamic art in the U.S. context, which include how exhibitions surge after major military conflicts and just how peripheral Islamic art is in America.