Blair Fowlkes-Childs and Michael Seymour will give a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Monday, April 22, at 12:15 pm. Their talk is entitled “Creating and Curating The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Blair Fowlkes-Childs and Michael Seymour will discuss the process of researching, shaping, and organizing the international loan exhibition The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (March 18–June 23, 2019). The exhibition will present a new perspective on the art and culture of the Middle East during the period of the Parthian and Roman empires’ struggle for regional control (ca. 100 BC–250 AD). Structured as a journey through southwestern Arabia, Nabataea, Judaea, Syria, and Mesopotamia, it will explore how cities and their inhabitants shaped their cultural identities, and focus on the role of art in this process. Important contemporary issues will also be addressed, particularly the deliberate recent destruction and looting of sites in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as some of the practical and ethical challenges confronting archaeologists and museums.

Blair Fowlkes-Childs is a research associate in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and previously held the Hagop Kevorkian Curatorial Fellowship. Her research focuses on the art and religions of the Roman Empire and she is writing a book titled The Cults of Syrian and Phoenician Gods in Rome and Religious Connections across the Empire. She has excavated in Syria, Cyprus, and Rome and has taught at several universities in London and New York. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Michael Seymour is an assistant curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He assisted on the special exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age (2014) and co-edited the symposium volume Assyria to Iberia: Art and Culture in the Iron Age (2016). He previously worked for the British Museum in the Department of the Middle East, where he co-curated the special exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality (2008). His research focuses on the reception and representation of the ancient Near East, particularly Babylon, and on Mesopotamian art of the first millennium BC. His book, Babylon: Legend, History, and the Ancient City (2014), examines the history of archaeological research at Babylon, and the city as a subject in art and culture. He completed his PhD at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.