Iranian Art from the Diaspora in Tehran…

When I was in Iran this fall giving a series of lectures for the Commonwealth Club of California, I had the opportunity to view art from the Iranian diaspora in Tehran (gallery hopping of Tehran’s more than 150 galleries has become a popular affair). A recent article in the NYTimes, Tehran’s Ab-Anbar Gallery Links the Diaspora and Global Art, discusses the efforts of Salman Matinfar, the founder and director of Ab-Anbar, to bring art from the Iranian diaspora to Tehran. In the wake of Iranian art becoming popular over the past decade at auction houses and galleries in the “west” and Gulf, Matinfar observes: “Lots of not historically important artists got attention because of lack of knowledge from curators, from museums, from a non-Middle Eastern perspective. Like a kind of Orientalism view into the Middle East.”