Frick’s ‘Treasured Ornament,’ after postponement, invites viewers to look deeply

Outside of the Frick’s “Treasured Ornament: 10 Centuries of Islamic Art,” a mural by Ebtehal Badawi of Building Bridges Pittsburgh asks, “How do you build bridges?” A Post-it wall beside it invites viewers to weigh in. Pre-opening, there were only magnets beneath the question, but one of the visitor services employees organized the magnets into the shape of a bridge.

The objects in “Treasured Ornament” span thousands of years and vast swaths of the globe. The ceramic work is exquisite — flashes of cobalt blue and glimmers of copper all displayed against dark mauve walls that make them pop and shine.

But this traveling collection of Islamic art comes to Pittsburgh this month after an initial postponement in November, where the museum cited concerns around escalating tensions in the Israel-Hamas war.

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It opened Aug. 17 and is slated to run until Oct. 20.

“Treasured Ornament” comes from the personal collection of two Syrian immigrants from West Virginia, Joseph and Omayma Touma. The exhibit made its home at the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, and traveled around the country to several locations including the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina.

“We reached the decision to postpone ‘Treasured Ornament’ with the intention of making it better,” the Frick’s Executive Director Elizabeth Barker said. “The additional time to prepare for the exhibition interpretation and educational programs enabled us to engage more community partners and subject-matter experts.”

Barker said she wanted the front-of-house staff to be better prepared to discuss Islam.

“Allowing ourselves more time to prepare for the exhibition meant we had the opportunity to provide our team with further training opportunities, including a guest lecturer who is a scholar of modern Islam, and deeper resources about Islamic art and culture that will hopefully create a richer experience for our guests,” she said.

The ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas should not prevent the display of Islamic art, said Laura Cherner, director of the Community Relations Council at Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh.

“As we stated at the time of the initial cancellation, there is no reason to connect a display and celebration of Islamic art with the actions of Hamas on 10/7,” Cherner said. “Celebrating history and culture through art is a wonderful way to connect and inspire people. We believe many art lovers in the community are looking forward to what should be a wonderful exhibit at the Frick.”

While the local Jewish community has “seen a dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents post Oct. 7,” Cherner added, this exhibit “is in no way connected nor does it contribute to that rise.”

“Treasured Ornament” makes a point to question the use of “Islamic art” as a catch-all term for art from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region. Curator Dawn Brean pointed out that one of her favorite objects in the collection, a small bowl from the Sasanian period in Iran, predates Islam. Wall text asks viewers to question how the phrase “Islamic art” might erase certain nuances within art from the Middle East.

A Christian icon from the Melkites -— a Byzantine Catholic and Orthodox community — and an illuminated copy of the “Bhagavad Gita” shows faith diversity that some might not expect from a show about the Islamic world. There’s even a Star of David in the show, on a 14th-century bowl from Iran, though the motif itself may not be directly connected to Judaism since the six-pointed star appears as a motif in early Islamic religious artwork, too.

The exhibition provides a map showing where each object came from, and one moment of surprise in the show is that the Toumas collected from Italy and Poland as well. Filippo Bartoli’s “Preparing for Prayer” comes from the Orientalist school of European painting that depicts imagined scenes from life in the SWANA region.

Brean noted that as far as she could tell, Bertoli never left Italy, and there are several inaccuracies to how he depicted Muslim prayer. Anthony Badowski’s “Pilgrims Encamped Near Cairo” has the same backstory, a painter who never left Europe imagining what he thought Islam looked like. But the Toumas bought them nonetheless, and they add a thought-provoking context within the show.

“We hope ‘Treasured Ornament’ provides an opportunity for people in our community to see Islamic art and artifacts that are not often exhibited in our region, and that it sparks their curiosity to learn more,” Barker said.

One of the objects that best illustrates that point is a small embossed bowl. At first glance, it’s a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, but underneath its plexiglass pedestal, there is a mirror that reveals the gleam of the delicate copper on the bottom.

Brean struggled with how to display the bowl in a way that people would be able to see the bottom, and she landed on the mirror as the best option. That tiny bowl serves as a reminder to look carefully at what you see and to seek out what might not be obvious.

“Treasured Ornament” pairs well with the Frick’s Clayton home tour “Gilded Not Golden,” which similarly engages with nuanced ideas while not overcorrecting at the expense of the beauty of the featured objects. Learning and discernment is important, but so is art appreciation of objects like that bowl.

Some might like what they see in the mirror, others might gravitate toward the bowl’s initial presentation. But shared experience of works of art and understanding of multiple perspectives is what, in the end, builds bridges. PJC

Emma Riva is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.