NEW YORK, NY.- Drawing on its unparalleled collection of modern Iranian art, the Grey Art Gallery presents Global/Local 1960–2015: Six Artists from Iran at New York University from January 12 to April 2, 2016. The exhibition presents approximately 90 works, comprising paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs, video, and a large mixed-media installation, among which are some 20 works from the Abby Grey collection. Global/Local is the first major museum exhibition in the U.S. to include both pioneering Iranian modernists and emerging artists working in Tehran and abroad. By featuring works from three generations of artists—Faramarz Pilaram (1937–1983), Parviz Tanavoli (b. 1937), Chohreh Feyzdjou (1955–1996), Shiva Ahmadi (b. 1975), Shahpour Pouyan (b. 1980), and Barbad Golshiri (b. 1982)—the exhibition sheds light on the delicate balancing acts required for those working outside the art world’s dominant North American-Western European axis. In particular it illuminates how each of these six artists has participated in international art discourses, merging global awareness with local traditions over a 55-year span that was punctuated by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and subsequent eight-year war with Iraq. Global/Local is curated by Grey Art Gallery Director Lynn Gumpert.

Interest in modern and contemporary art from the Middle East and Iran has grown exponentially over the past few decades. This has been especially true in recent years, when turmoil in the region and the tense political relationship between Iran and the U.S. have dominated the news. Yet sanctions have made it extremely difficult to see modern Iranian art outside that country. In response, the Grey Art Gallery has devoted increased attention to the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art, beginning in 2002 with its landmark show Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture and accompanying publication that was one of the first overviews of modern Iranian art in English.

“It is an enormous privilege to oversee such rich and extensive holdings of Iranian art,” notes Ms. Gumpert. “Mrs. Grey was truly ahead of her time,” she continues. “When she travelled abroad in her efforts to collect modern art by non-Western artists, she sought out artists who were aware of what was happening internationally. It has been extremely rewarding to study this outstanding collection and to collaborate with NYU colleagues and other scholars to situate it in broader cultural and historical contexts. We are proud to have introduced modern Iranian art to American audiences, and are pleased today to also present subsequent generations of artists who have learned from their pioneering predecessors represented in the Abby Grey collection.”

Abby Weed Grey amassed her remarkably prescient collection of some 700 pieces—including about 200 works of Iranian modern art as well as more than 100 from Turkey and nearly 80 from India—on numerous trips to the Middle East and Asia in the 1960s and ’70s, undertaken to promote artistic exchange. In 1974, Mrs. Grey established the Grey Art Gallery at NYU as a permanent home for her collection, with the intention of furthering her cross-cultural approach in a global academic setting as well as complementing NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. A self-described naïf, Grey nonetheless—as she notes in her memoir The Picture Is the Window, The Window Is the Picture—“was able to arrange the first exhibition of original contemporary American art to be seen by Turkish and Iranian artists. Moreover, my informal contacts . . . laid the groundwork for precedent-setting shows in the United States.”