HIAA undergraduate concentrator Camille Blanco has been recognized as the 2025 USA and Canada Regional Winner by the Global Undergraduate Awards in the Art History & Theory category for her entry “A Persian Ewer Without a Past: Uncovering the History of a Thirteenth Century Turquoise Ewer at the RISD Museum”.
Evaluated by a global network of judges, each of whom is an expert in their field, Camille's entry was selected as the single-best and most outstanding of the Art History & Theory category's Highly Commended Entrants in the USA and Canada regions. She originally wrote it for Professor Margaret Graves’ HIAA1418 course “Islamic Art in the RISD Museum: Thinking With Objects” in the Spring 2025 term.
This Persian ewer by an unknown maker at the RISD Museum (ac. 27.118) was believed to have been made in the 1300s in Kashan (a city in Iran). A close visual and formal analysis of the Ewer revealed that its neck and handle were modern restorations added onto a fragment of the 'original' medieval Ewer, masquerading it as a type of archaeological ceramic, whose restored 'wholeness,' made it more valuable and desirable amongst the prominent collectors of Persian art in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, its year of accession (1927) locates it in a period of great activity in the U.S. market for Iranian antiquities, where collectors sought to bolster their collections of Persian art through antiquities that they or dealers would bring back from their travels. The RISD Ewer, like many others that came before it, has a rich and complicated life that is a testament to the high demand for certain objects like it, which is what brought them into existence in the 19th and 20th centuries.