Islamic Tiles in Museums: Past, Present & Future

Visiting Scholar: Richard McClary

Islamic tiles are always a challenge to present, as individually they are but one small part of a larger decorative programme. This talk offers a way to contextualise the objects and tell their stories more fully by examining the history of displaying Islamic tiles, some current approaches and through the prism of a series of tiles from a single building in Iran.

Richard McClary has conducted fieldwork in India, Iran, Turkey, Central Asia and across the Middle East. He is a trustee and Research Director for the British Institute of Persian Studies, and held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2015-18), examining the surviving corpus of Qarakhanid architecture in Central Asia.