Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Brown University was recently interviewed by Dr. Miranda Melcher for the New Books Network Podcast. The discussion focused on Graves' new publication "Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics".
The book provides a remarkable history of forged and fabricated Islamic ceramics, their makers, and their unique role in colonial trade and tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.