As we hoped, the American Quran exhibit (thru March 18) at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery is well worth a visit. (Although you can also see what I”m talking about via the DM Register’s good article on the show www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120211/ENT/302110010/An-American-take-Quran or via the artist Sandow Birk’s website.)
Dozens of pages (including the ones below) of L.A. Artist Sandow Birk Quran line the walls of the large gallery inside the Bucksbaum Center for the Arts on the southwest corner of the small tidy campus. Each has an illustration of a classic American scene or snippet of recent U.S. history – smoke billowing out of the twin towers on 9/11; bodies floating in the flood waters of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans;l sandbaggers trying to hold back the floodwaters on what looks like the Mississippi River; shoppers at Walmart; a street scene in the multicultural soup of L.A. with shop signs in Spanish, Vietnamese and Arabic.
Dropped into each scene is a page of religious text, written in English, done in an ornate calligraphy. Then the “page” is decorated with an elegant border of delicate lines plus strips of what looks like gold leaf reminiscent of the “real” Qurans. The curators wisely included a few pages of ancient Qurans from the college’s collection which helped visitors see the connection between the old and new versions. There’s also a ceramic tile sculpture – resembling both an ATM and a mihrab (a Muslim prayer niche) – that Birk did with another artist.
At times, I could make out how the illustration corresponded to the dense text. Much of the time though, I couldn’t – and I longed to be able to look at it in a more leisurely fashion, by having it all assembled in a book that I could leaf through (rather than having to stand, often with my neck craned, trying to read the pages hung on a wall.). I also longed to take home a piece of the exhibit for my wall – perhaps a page that has been converted to a poster.
