Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection

Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection highlights important pieces by renowned artists such as Parviz Tanavoli, Fahrelnissa Zeid, and M.F. Husain, as well as works from their peers in this period around the 1960s. These artworks were collected in the 1960s and early 1970s by Abby Weed Grey, a North American collector who made multiple trips abroad in that period, to explore and collect modern art from across Asia. She made eight trips to Iran, and four trips each to India and Turkey, where she acquired the prints, drawings, paintings, and sculpture that came to form the nucleus of the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern art, housed at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery. The exhibition includes the collector’s personal letters, journals, invoices, catalogs, invitations, and photographs from the Abby Weed Grey Papers in the NYU Archives. The archives make visible how these artists drew on their specific heritages while also engaging in global discourses around key issues of modernity. 

Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection is organized by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, and is made possible in part by the generous support of Dalinc and Mehves Ariburnu; Violet Jabara Charitable Trust; WLS Spencer Foundation; A. Alfred Taubman Foundation; Avid Modjtabai; Charina Endowment Fund; Persian Heritage Foundation; Vazifdar Builders Pvt. Ltd.; Ariel and Alaleh Ostad; the Grey’s Director’s Circle, Inter/National Council, and Friends; and the Abby Weed Grey Trust. In-kind support is provided by ArtCareNYC Inc.

Image: Prabhakar Barwe, King and Queen of Spades, 1967. Oil and paper on canvas, 99.5x137.5 cm. Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art Collection. Gift of Abby Weed Grey.