Newsletter: The Metropolitan Museum of Art & Columbia University Joint Cultural Heritage Workshop

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in partnership with Columbia University, will be holding the third regional cultural heritage workshop, The Future of the Past: Addressing the Cultural Heritage Crisis in Iraq and Syria.

January 02, 2018

The workshop will be held on February 10 -11, 2018 at Columbia Global Centers | Amman with a keynote lecture by Sheila Canby, the Patti Cadby Birch Curator in Charge of the Museums Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to open the workshop on the evening of February 9.

The goal of the workshop is to invite museum specialists from Iraq, Syria as well as Jordan, to discuss their current situation and needs with each other, as well as with a few colleagues from Europe and North America. In addition, the workshop also aims to identify other areas in which The Metropolitan Museum and Columbia University can continue to offer support to Iraqi and Syrian museum colleagues in the future to preserve their countries’ cultural heritage. The main topics for the workshop will be photographic documentation, education and training needs, emergency care needs, and publication of material.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in partnership with Columbia University, will complete a follow up training course for the photographers who attended last year’s photographic documentation training in Amman. This two-day training, which will be held at the American Center for Oriental Research, is designed to help give the photographers better support with correcting, saving and transferring images and to assess their work so far. In addition, we aim to fully train five new photographers in how best to document collections and to use the equipment in the photographic documentation kit.

A previous workshop took place in November of 2016, also at the Amman Center on November 11-13, and brought together museum specialists from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, as well as colleagues from Europe and North America. Participants discussed their current situation in the ongoing crisis and identified pressing needs and ways to address them. This was followed by a training session on November 14-19 at the American Center of Oriental Research, on photographic documentation of museum objects.