Published March 28, 2019 by Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Focus on the Assyrian Reliefs

This spring, the Assyrian reliefs will be the focus of two exciting programs.

Assyrian Relief at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

This spring, the Assyrian reliefs will be the focus of two exciting programs. On Wednesday, April 24th, Dr. Yelena Rakic will give a public lecture in Kresge Auditorium (VAC) on the history of collecting antiquities from the Ancient Near East in the United States, from the 19th century up to the present day, with a special focus on the history of Assyrian reliefs. Her talk, “Collecting the Ancient Near East: Discovery and Display of the Past,” promises to help us think through the complexity of collecting and exhibiting antiquities from the Ancient Near East. Dr. Rakic is an Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In May, the Museum of Art will host more than two dozen scholars, curators, conservators, and museum educators from institutions across the Northeast to inaugurate a new digital collaborative around Assyrian reliefs in the United States. The two-day workshop is the first phase of a promising long-term initiative aimed at bringing together knowledge about the relief panels and fragments from the Northwest Palace in the Assyrian capital at Nimrud in Iraq. Relief panels like those at Bowdoin make up the foundation of the ancient collections in nearly two dozen museums across the northeastern United States. Participants will explore the many-layered and intertwined histories of our reliefs, the current state of digital approaches to the reliefs and the site, and put in place a roadmap for the next steps of this exciting collaboration. Participants include representatives from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, Yale University Art Gallery, Middlebury College Museum of Art and more. While participation is limited to invited participants, we look forward to sharing more about the workshop and encourage you to stay tuned!