Qatar Museums collaborates with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

Qatar Museums will collaborate with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in a partnership involving the exchange of exhibitions, programs and scholarly cooperation, Qatar News Agency reported on Wednesday. 

Qatar Museums has made a significant donation to the New York museum to commemorate the reopening of Qatar’s reimagined Museum of Islamic Art and the 10th anniversary of the Met’s opening of renovated Islamic art department galleries. In exchange, the Met’s art collection from the Umayyad and Abbasid periods has been named the Qatar Gallery.

As part of the collaboration, Qatar Museums has loaned works from its collections to the Met for exhibitions such as “Jerusalem in the Middle Ages” (2016), “Sultans of Deccan India, 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy” (2015), “The Great Age of the Seljuks” (2016), and “Monumental Journey: Girault de Prangey’s Daguerreotypes” (2016). 

Works from the Met’s collection will be on display in Doha from Oct. 26 in a special exhibition at the newly renovated Museum of Islamic Art. The exhibition, “Baghdad: Eyes Delight,” focuses on the art of the Abbasid period, one of two classical eras featured in the Met’s Qatar Gallery. 

During his visit to New York, Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani attended the reception ceremony held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the collaboration announcement. The collaboration is tribute to Qatar Museum’s mission of sharing art and culture from Qatar and the region with the rest of the world. 

Image Credit: AFP