Students’ backpacks often overflow with creative projects—paper plates, cotton balls, and popsicle sticks transformed into cute animals or seasonal decorations (all sprinkled with an inevitable layer of glitter). Some of these creations land on the fridge, while others find their way to the recycling bin. Art supplies are cheap and easy to find, allowing us to create more and keep less.

In early America, experiences looked much different, and students didn’t use as many basic staples like paper and crayons. Even the most prestigious schools possessed limited materials, saving them for important projects. Needlework—intricate silk-on-linen or silk-on-silk designs—could teach girls multiple skills in addition to sewing. From these pieces, young girls learned the alphabet, numbers, and even moral teachings from scripture and literature. For these projects, merchants imported silk from China at a significant cost. Students spent months completing samplers and embroideries, proudly displaying them in their homes and passing them down from one generation to the next.

Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery tells the story of the schoolgirls—and their teachers—who created masterpieces that required not just skill, but diligence. Here, the show’s curator, Ken Myers, Department Head, American Art, talks about the significance of needlework both in schools and in society at large. The exhibition is on view now through June 15, 2025.

What prompted the Painted with Silk exhibition?

For almost 20 years I’ve known a local couple who have built a remarkable collection of American folk art, with especially strong holdings of needlework by American schoolgirls. The needleworks are fascinating, in part because they were often made by very young girls. And they can be very beautiful. Initially, I proposed a show of 25 objects. When I shared the idea with the DIA director, he encouraged me to expand it into a much bigger exhibition. Since the first collectors did not have enough material to fill the larger space, they introduced me to two other pairs of collectors. The exhibition now includes 59 historical pieces — two from the mid-1600s, 58 from between 1735 and 1835, and 11 contemporary samplers by artist Elaine Riechek that adapt the form of the historic samplers.

Printed images were expensive, so that society would have been image poor in comparison to today. We take images for granted. They're trivial. We all carry phones with an infinite number of images on them. So, framed needlework would have been one of the most visible decorative objects in a house. Depending on the wealth of the family, maybe they owned some portraits and prints on the wall, but there wouldn't have been a lot, even in 1830. So, these embroideries would have been impressive works, which is one reason why so many of them survived. They became family heirlooms.

How was sewing both a practical skill and a symbolic skill in girls’ education in the 1700s and 1800s?

Methods for teaching reading and writing began to change in the 1830s, but until then writing was taught separately from reading, and many girls from poor or working-class families were not taught how to write. The simplest samplers were made with silk thread on linen and contained little more than letters (scripts and print) and numbers. If they stayed in school long enough, girls might make more complicated samplers that included images and quotations. Some of these include alphabets and numbers, but many didn’t. The most advanced works, which we refer to as embroideries rather than samplers, are made with silk threads on a silk support, often with sections painted with watercolor. These were produced by girls from the wealthiest families who were able to attend the most elite schools in the most cosmopolitan cities—Boston, Hartford, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

Completion of a complicated sampler and pictorial embroideries took time, diligence, and self-control, all valued skills expected of well-to-do and wealthy young girls and women. For these girls and women, the completed embroidery served as a kind of diploma, which is why they were often framed and displayed in prominent places in their homes. Which is also why so many of them survive.

Embroidery was a potentially marketable skill, so if they ever needed to support themselves or their families, women who had learned to embroider could turn use their skill to make money. But that would not have been the case for most of the girls who made the samplers and pictorial embroideries in Painting with Silk. Most of those girls may have used their skill to do some mending but would have depended on servants or professional seamstresses to make their clothes and household linens.

Most of the embroideries in the exhibition emphasize the importance of leading a virtuous life, which meant being hardworking, diligent, and obeying appropriate authority — teacher, mother, father, God. They also reinforced many gender assumptions of the day, preparing the girls to be dutiful wives and mothers who would assist their husbands and raise the children to be virtuous citizens.

Many of the embroideries deal with death, either by incorporating quotations about death, or by picturing tombstones, or by representing scenes from the Bible or literature which deal with death.  The lesson taught by these embroideries was that life is short, death inevitable, so that the most important thing you can do in this life is to live virtuously so that after death your soul will go to heaven.

From the beginning of my work on the exhibition I knew that I wanted to emphasize the relationship between the girls and their teachers. We selected and organized works with the hope that the exhibition would attract school groups, parents with children, and grandparents with grandchildren. With those groups as target audiences, we knew that we wanted to stress the idea the opportunity to go to school should not be taken for granted—or wasted. Education is both an opportunity and a privilege. We thought that teachers, parents, and grandparents would appreciate that theme.

What are two of your favorite works by Contemporary Artist Elaine Reichek, and how do they contrast from the exhibition’s historical embroideries?

Reichek’s How Blest the Maid combines the “house and barn” pattern found in both Portsmouth, New Hampshire samplers in the exhibition with her variation on a short poem embroidered on several other samplers including Melancia Bowker’s from 1817:

How blest the maid whom circling years improve
Her God the object of her purest love...

But where the original verse pledged the child’s devotion to God, Reichek transformed the poem’s original meaning by pledging her devotion to her art:

How blest the maid
whom circling years improve
Her art the object of her warmest love...

Where the historic samplers taught children to put the needs of others ahead of their own wants and desires, Reichek declares, I am artist, and as an artist, I choose my own goals, not ones that are expected of me.

In all the historic materials, home is represented as a place of safety, security, and love. But we know that not all homes are happy. So, we ended the exhibition with a Reichek sampler that illustrates Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome (1911). The title character and his wife cannot escape their childless and loveless marriage. The Fromes are farmers, and the exaggerated horizontality of Reichek’s design emphasizes the lonely isolation of their snowbound farmhouse. The landscape is chilly and frozen, like their lives.

What questions do you hope visitors ask themselves as they walk through the exhibition?

I am ultimately a historian, and I'm interested in the ways in which our society is both unlike and like the societies in which the historical embroideries were produced. I'm hoping that Painted with Silk will provoke some thoughts about what it would have been like to be a young girl from a moderate to wealthy family in the years between 1730 and 1840. What opportunities would one have? What would your society be encouraging you to do with your life? But also, how am I, too, being encouraged to make something of my life today? In what ways are the pressures on me like those experienced by a young girl at earlier times in American history.

No one is completely free to form themselves. We are all formed by our societies before we gain the ability to question the assumptions and values that we've inherited. 

The girls who made these embroideries had less opportunity and freedom to refashion themselves than most of us do today. But like them, all of us have the ability, however limited it may sometimes be, to make choices about what we believe and value, and how we want to live our lives.

Coffee culture isn’t an invention of the twentieth century. For hundreds of years, people around the world have started their day at home with a cup of fresh, fragrant brew, or met up with friends for caffeination and conversation. But the origins of the beverage, and the culture that developed around it, are in the Islamic world — a point made clear in the Detroit Institute of Arts’ exhibition The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World, which dedicates an entire section to this one food experience. While the items in that gallery are mostly Turkish, they show how coffee, in a relatively short time, became a global cultural force. 

Coffee was originally cultivated in East Africa but was first consumed as a beverage in Yemen in the 1400s. In the 1500s, Yemeni Sufis brought it to Mecca and the drink became popular throughout the Islamic world. In Turkey and elsewhere in the Ottoman empire, coffee culture was widespread by the mid-1500s, and by the 1600s was as popular as it is today. 

Turkey (Kütahya). Coffee Pot, 1700s. Underglaze-painted fritware. The British Museum, London, Bequeathed by John Henderson, 1878,1230.554. © The Trustees of the British Museum 

In the exhibition’s coffee section, objects include coffeepots, cups, and tray covers for presenting coffee sets, including several 18th-century Turkish coffee pots, cups and saucers and a coffee and tea set from the Ottoman Empire. A scent box with the aroma of coffee is available for visitors to sniff, rounding out the gallery visit with some sensory stimulation.  

In the Ottoman Empire, offering coffee to guests became an important part of hospitality. Coffee also created its own public culture, as cafes sprang up where men gathered to talk, share news, and enjoy entertainment. The roots of coffee culture — specifically, its origins in Yemen — are particularly important in metro Detroit, where people of Yemeni descent have sought to “blend the ancient tradition of Yemeni coffee and the modern U.S. market of high-end organic coffee,” according to a Detroit News article chronicling the boom of Yemeni coffee shops in southeastern Michigan and beyond.  

Ibrahim Alhasbani is the founder and owner of Qahwah House, a chain of Yemeni coffee houses that opened its first location in Dearborn in 2017. Born in Yemen, he’s the eighth generation to work in the world of coffee and recalls watching his mother make the family’s daily drink from beans she roasted fresh every morning. 

Qahwah House has worked closely with the DIA during The Art of Dining, serving their Adeni Chai drink in Kresge Court through the end of the exhibition, and promoting the show in its southeastern Michigan cafes via custom cup sleeves. Qahwah House also took part in the DIA’s Nov. 16 event Spiced Stories: A Celebration of Islamic Coffee, Tea, and Cooking, which brought live music, delicious food and drink, and presentations about cooking culture to the museum.  

Alhasbani believes passionately in the role that places like Qahwah House fill in the community; creating relaxed, family-friendly, all-ages spaces where people are encouraged to linger and mingle without having to spring for a pricey meal or be legally old enough to buy a drink. “If you’re young and just want to meet your friends, or if you don’t want to eat at a restaurant or a bar, where are you going to go?” he says. “This is a place for everyone. People come from all different backgrounds here, and they sit next to each other and enjoy being social. This is how we get to know each other.”  

A visit to any Qahwah House location bears that out; there are professionals on laptops and students working on projects alongside friends getting together, families meeting up, and lively conversations happening between tables — all over cups of Yemeni coffee and tea drinks, and often late into the evening. 

For Alhasbani, it’s reminiscent of the world he grew up in. “Coffee actually is a part of our culture,” he says, consumed throughout the day, for all occasions. “Of course you start your day with coffee,” he says. “But if you go to visit someone, you drink coffee. If it’s after a meal, you drink coffee. If someone comes to you, you serve them coffee. It's very, very special, especially for a Yemeni.” 

Alhasbani is meticulous about the making of Qawah House’s drinks; for the first six months, he made each drink himself. And, as might be expected, he has strong opinions on the best way to enjoy coffee: "If you want to know the quality of the coffee, you have to try it black. Don't add milk or sugar or roast it extra dark; that takes the flavor. Drink medium roast, just black, and you will taste the whole flavor. This is the only way, if you want to enjoy a cup of coffee.”  

However you take your coffee (or chai), don’t miss The Art of Dining, the DIA’s glorious celebration of food culture in the Islamic world, before it closes Jan. 5! 

It’s hard to imagine a more universally loved and celebrated topic than food and dining. We live in an era of celebrity chefs, reality baking shows, and social-media food pics. But a love of food and dining isn’t new, as The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World demonstrates. And the significance of what we eat and with whom, and our rituals surrounding dining, are themes that span all cultures, places, and eras.  

With 230 beautiful objects drawn from the vast regions known as the Islamic world, The Art of Dining celebrates elegant dining and a love of food, and their shared ties to culture in the regions showcased, and around the world.  

Originally organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World is on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts from Sept. 22, 2024, through Jan. 5, 2025. Here, the show’s DIA curator, Katherine Kasdorf, Associate Curator, Arts of Asia and the Islamic World, talks about why this show is important in the here and now. 

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator of Islamic Art and Department Head of Art of the Middle East there. She devoted many years of research to the project and put together an amazing exhibition and catalog with contributions by leading scholars of art and culinary histories of the Islamic world. 

When we say “Islamic world,” by the way, we mean regions where Islam holds significant cultural and historical importance. Historically, these regions were part of many empires and kingdoms governed by Muslim people, with geographical borders shirting over time. The Islamic world encompasses a vast geographical area including the Middle East and North Africa, Iran and Central Asia, parts of South and Southeast Asia, parts of Spain, and more. These regions have always been home to many cultures, languages, and religions. So in this context, “Islamic” is more a cultural term than a religious term.  

There are many reasons this exhibition is a good fit for the DIA. Besides the merits of the show itself, Metro Detroit is home to a lot of people who have a personal connection to one or more of the regions or cultural traditions at the center of the show. The Arab American community is one of the largest in the country. There are also Bangladeshi, Iranian, Turkish, Indian, Pakistani, and many other communities who might find a connection to the exhibition. Of course, many people love Islamic art who might not identify with one of these regions in terms of their personal heritage, and we hope the show will also attract those who may not have a prior interest in Islamic art. But we like to present exhibitions that reflect our communities, and aside from our gallery of Islamic art, which visitors can see any time, it has been a long time since the museum has presented an exhibition focused on art of the Islamic world. We think this show is the perfect opportunity to do that, and I’m really grateful to DIA leadership for seeing that. 

I think anyone who sees the exhibition in both venues will notice right away that we’re doing a different kind of installation. At LACMA, they took a more pared-back approach, presenting the objects against white walls with minimal labels. Here, we’ve painted the gallery walls a dark blue, with gold accents inspired by Islamic architecture and geometric shapes found in some of the exhibition’s paintings. I think it sets off the objects beautifully. Also, for the DIA, my colleague, Interpretive Planner Megan DiRienzo, and I have written a robust array of labels, including some multipage illustrated labels to delve deeper into some of the more complex works or playful groupings. We don’t expect any one visitor to read all the labels, but if someone wants to know more about a work, we don’t want them to be disappointed.  

The show’s title is another difference. At LACMA, it was called Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting. But after doing an online survey in November and December, as well as interviews in our galleries with visitors, in-depth phone interviews with community members, and a town hall meeting at the Arab American National Museum (which our colleagues there generously helped organize), we took all that feedback from community members and landed on our title: The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World. We hope this title speaks to the show’s broadly relatable themes — the enjoyment of food and dining — while also conveying the centrality of Islamic art to the exhibition. 

The feedback from our community engagement activities also informed the exhibition’s labels. In some instances, people asked questions that Megan and I wanted to be sure to address, and in other instances people brought up really nice points that we wanted to work into the text. And, I should add, credit for conducting the survey and interviews goes to my colleagues in the department of Evaluation and Research: Ken Morris, Erin Wilcox, and Caitlin Santer. 

Continuing our commitment to community partnerships, the DIA is collaborating with several organizations, businesses, and community leaders to host free public programming, educator workshops, and more. So although the exhibition was organized by LACMA, here at the DIA we’ve really made it our own. 

I was excited about this exhibition the moment I heard about it, even before LACMA approached the DIA about being a venue for the show. The objects are absolutely outstanding, and food is a broadly popular and relatable theme. Everyone eats! And many people are interested in gourmet cultures where the presentation of food is as important as the taste.  

Most of the objects in the show would have belonged to wealthy people, and many were made for members of the ruling elite, but just like us, they used bowls, platters, spoons, and cups, and they enjoyed coming together with friends and family for a meal. Some of the exhibition’s labels invite people to imagine what a bowl or platter might have looked like when filled with saffron rice, for instance, or what it would have felt like to hold a glass with decorative ridges on its surface. The show invites us to make lots of multisensory connections — there are even scent boxes in some of the galleries that relate to objects displayed nearby. One is for coffee, in a section about coffee culture, and the other two are floral scents that might have filled the air of a dining space. In the historical Islamic world, pleasant smells were an important part of the dining experience — rooms would be perfumed with flowers and incense, and water for handwashing was scented with rosewater and other aromatics. 

 Collections of Islamic art are filled with ceramics, glassware, and metal objects that were made for food or drink, but this is the first exhibition that puts this function front and center. So, my hope is that the show will appeal to many people who are not yet familiar with art from the Islamic world but are drawn to the themes of food and dining, and that it will also attract people with a prior interest in art from these regions.  

The exhibition is organized into thematic sections, which explore food culture from different angles. At the DIA, the theme of clean and safe drinking water is woven into the introduction — because you can’t have a thriving food culture without water.  

Another section looks at the dining experience by focusing on the sufra, a cloth spread or dining table where food is laid out for a meal. This section features a rich variety of works, including a sufra textile, paintings representing people eating together, and objects such as bowls, trays, cups, spoons, and napkins, which would be found on or near a sufra. There’s also an interactive sufra, where visitors are invited to sit on low cushions around a circular table to experience a digitally presented six-course meal based on historical recipes from throughout the Islamic world. (This concept might sound familiar to some DIA visitors — the digital sufra was developed by LACMA, but it was directly inspired by the DIA’s French dining table!) 

Other sections include “Continuity and Change,” which explores connections between dining cultures before and after the advent of Islam in the 600s; “Eating for Health,” which includes food-focused medical texts and pharmacy objects associated with food; “In the Kitchen,” which features works related to food preparation; “Outdoor Dining”; “Music and Entertainment”; “Dressing for Dinner”; and “Coffee Culture.” One of the last sections explores connections between the Islamic world and other regions, including China and Europe, with objects that show shared artistic styles or techniques in objects made for food. 

There are a lot of special works in this exhibition, and I’m thrilled to have them here in Detroit. One that I’m especially excited about is an illustrated cookbook from central India, now in the collection of the British Library, which was produced around the 1490s for the royal court in the city of Mandu (which was also called Shadiyabad, or “City of Joy”). It's called the Ni‘matnama, or “Book of Delights,” and it’s a historically important work that’s well known to scholars, but it’s also just completely delightful. It includes recipes for all kinds of dishes and snacks, and for various beverages, perfumes, aphrodisiacs, and medicines. At the DIA, the manuscript will be open to a section with recipes for rice dishes flavored with things like rosewater, saffron, ambergris, and other spices and aromatics. And, of course, lots of ghee.  

Another highlight of the show is a multimedia installation by Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, an Iraqi-born artist now based in the Netherlands, which LACMA commissioned for the exhibition. It has a beautifully poetic title, A Thread of Light between My Mother’s Fingers and Heaven, and it includes a large-scale animation, framed drawings, and photographs — all of which are rooted in Sadik’s memories of his mother, her homemade bread, and family meals in Baghdad. Sadik came to Detroit for the opening, and we hosted a live conversation between him and Diana Abouali, Director of the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, on September 22. That was a really special event. 

Sadik’s work will be difficult to miss, but some of the other highlights are smaller in scale. Another historical piece to look for is a glass ewer (the term for a spouted vessel with a handle, similar to a pitcher), made in Western Asia or Egypt around the year 1000, where an artist put a layer of green glass over a layer of colorless glass, then carved away the green layer to leave a design of birds, horned animals, and other motifs in relief. It’s an amazing piece and it’s sometimes called “the Corning ewer” because it’s now in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. This piece has been known to art historians for decades, but this is the first exhibition that focuses not only on its amazing artistry, but on what it might have contained. It could have been used for many beverages in its long history, including water, but if we picture it holding a colorful juice or sherbet, or perhaps wine, which was consumed by some elite people in the Islamic world, we can imagine how the color of the beverage would have added to the visual appeal of the ewer. 

I have lots of favorite works in the exhibition, including a tiny jade spoon from Mughal India, inlaid with precious stones, with its end carved into the shape of a bird’s head, now in the Al-Sabah collection in Kuwait, and a rooster-headed ewer from Seljuq Iran, part of the DIA’s own collection, and many others. I hope visitors enjoy finding their own favorites. 
 

The cookbooks in this exhibition, like any manuscript, were luxury objects commissioned by wealthy people. An illustrated manuscript like the Ni‘matnama was particularly expensive. Everything was written by hand; the patron had to cover the cost of the materials used to produce the book, like paper, ink, and sometimes paint; and expert scribes, painters, and bookbinders had to be paid for their time and skill. The tradition of recipe books being produced for the elite in the Islamic world dates to 10th-century Baghdad, when the author Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq compiled his Kitab al-Tabikh, or “Book of Dishes,” which brought together recipes that had been popular at the Abbasid court for generations. This text and other recipe books circulated for centuries across the Islamic world.  

 

Caliphs, kings, nobles, and other wealthy peoplehad an interest in gourmet culture. Some recipe books may have served as manuals for kitchen staff, but many were intended for patrons whose staff would have prepared the dishes for them. This seems to be the case with the Ni‘matnama. It's a luxurious illustrated manuscript produced for the sultan Ghiyath al-Din, and he had an interest in its content. It's likely that he enjoyed many of the recipes recorded in the book, but I don’t think his kitchen staff would have been consulting this copy of the text as they made rice with rosewater, saffron, and ambergris.  

The exhibition catalogue includes several historical recipes updated for modern cooking.The first time I went through it, one recipe in particular caught my eye. It’s a dish called judhaba al-mishmish, from the Abbasid court in Baghdad in the early-to mid-800s. You roast a chicken, then cover the pan with pieces of a flat bread like pita, which soak up the drippings, then you spread it with a mixture of apricot, saffron, and rosewater, and put the shredded chicken on top. I haven’t ventured to make this dish yet, but I got to try it at the home of DIA patrons Ali Moiin and Bill Kupsky, who hosted a fundraising dinner in support of the exhibition. They made the dish to perfection, and it was delicious! 

I haven’t had much time to cook elaborate dishes since working on the exhibition, but my partner Jeff and I have been expanding our repertoire of mujaddara recipes. Also, I love hummus, and I was fascinated to learn while doing research for the show that the hummus most of us eat today is much plainer than the hummus that people in the medieval Islamic world knew. According to Paulina Lewicka, the author of a book about all things food-related in medieval Cairo, hummus called not only for chickpeas, tahini, garlic, and lemon juice, but also vinegar, oil, mint, pistachios, and spices like cinnamon, coriander, and caraway. Maybe I should try dressing up my hummus. 

The Islamic world certainly was, and still is, very large and diverse, and many of the works in the show demonstrate cross-cultural interactions and multidirectional inspiration. For example, blue-and-white ceramics — which remain popular in kitchens and dining rooms across the world today — have their origins in the 800s in Basra, Iraq, which was a thriving port city and a hub for people, things, and ideas from many parts of the world. Inspired by the smooth white surfaces of imported Chinese ceramics, potters in Basra created a tin-based glaze that gave their ceramics a similar texture and color. But while the Chinese imports were plain white, Basra potters decorated their ceramics with designs painted in cobalt blue. These were exported far and wide, and before long, Chinese potters also started painting their white ceramics in cobalt, to fill the growing demand for blue-and-white dishes in international markets. This cobalt, by the way, was imported from Iran and surrounding regions, so international exchange played a role in more than one way. By the 1300s–1400s, Chinese blue-and-white porcelain was a mark of prestige and elegance in many parts of the world, and potters in Iran, Turkey, and other places developed their own regional versions, inspired by the more expensive Chinese imports. The exhibition tells this story through beautiful ceramic works from many of these places, and through paintings representing people eating from blue-and-white dishes. 

 

Cross-regional and cross-cultural interactions come into play in many other ways within the exhibition, too. There are cookbooks and health manuals that were translated into different languages and copied in many regions; there are paintings by artists who migrated to new places, bringing their artistic practices with them but also incorporating new styles and techniques into their work; and there are objects that would have been traded across long distances. For example, there’s a huge, green-glazed storage jar from the DIA’s collection in the exhibition. Jars like this one were made for foods such as oils, syrups, or grains, and they were used to both store and transport those foods. That's another way these objects and traditions of material culture traveled across different geographies. 

There are a lot of possible takeaways, but first and foremost, I hope visitors enjoy the show and learn something new that they find interesting. Maybe some of them will discover an interest in Islamic art and be inspired to visit the DIA’s permanent-collection galleries! I would also love it if the exhibition encourages people to reflect on the similarities and differences between their own experiences with food and food culture, and those they see in the show — and to think about similarities and differences between the many diverse cultural traditions that are represented within the show itself. It's interesting to see that people in, say, ninth-century Baghdad, which might seem distant to us today, were also interested in gourmet dishes and beautiful tableware. We can relate to that through the shared practices of eating and drinking, of serving and enjoying food in communal meals. But it’s just as important to notice the variety of objects represented in the show. The people who made and used them came from specific places and moments in history; they were not all the same. 

At the end of the exhibition, we have a response station that prompts visitors to share how food connects them to people, places, and memories. I’m optimistic that we’ll get a lot of thoughtful responses, and I’m looking forward to seeing them. 

Learn more about the exhibition at dia.org/ArtofDining.  

------ 

The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World is organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

At the Detroit Institute of Arts, the exhibition is generously supported by the Friends of Asian Arts and Cultures.

The Art of Dining: Food Culture in the Islamic World has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. 

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.