The Inhabited World: Living with Nature
From 400 to 1800 CE, people across the Middle East and North Africa lived at cultural crossroads where nature was both a resource and an inspiration.
This exhibition is the fourth in the Object Spotlights series, which offers focused explorations of key themes and materials in advance of the Kelsey Museum’s upcoming permanent gallery, Crossroads of Culture, 400–1800. The gallery will highlight the Kelsey’s collections of Byzantine and Islamic art and material culture, with a focus on ancient centers of learning, the movement of people, and intercultural exchange across the Middle East and North Africa.
This spotlight installation explores how communities lived with, adapted to, and reimagined their environments. The natural world influenced artistic expression, domestic life, and spiritual experience in profound ways.
Organized into three overlapping themes, this exhibition considers different modes of engagement with the environment. Some efforts of past peoples focused on augmenting the environment—controlling light with portable oil lamps, managing temperature with clothing and head coverings, or designing architecture for heating and cooling. Others focused on capturing the environment through artistic and practical forms, including floral and faunal motifs on textiles and ceramic tiles or filtered water jars that merged utility with visual expression. Consuming the environment took many forms as well: drawing water, preparing food, minting coins from precious metals, processing textile fibers, and harvesting wood all transformed natural resources into objects of value, use, and meaning.
These modes of interaction overlapped and informed one another. Together, they reveal a deep and enduring relationship between people and the elements that shaped their world.
—Heidi Hilliker (MES), Sam Ross (IPAMAA), Bailey Franzoi (IPAMAA), and Kara Larson (UMMAA), graduate student curators
