The Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, organized by Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, is a leading international conference on Islamic art and culture. It is co-sponsored by Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, VCUQatar and the Qatar Foundation. Previous symposia were held in Richmond, Virginia in 2004 and in Doha, Qatar in 2007. The third biennial symposium, And Diverse Are Their Hues: Color in Islamic Art and Culture, will be held in Córdoba, Spain, November 2-4, 2009.
The first two symposia brought together twenty speakers from ten countries to explore a single theme in Islamic art and culture. The speakers came from all walks of scholarly life and have included architects and artists in addition to art historians. Keynote addresses were given by Oleg Grabar, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2004) and Carole Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic History and head of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh (2007).
The proceedings of the 2007 Symposium, held in Doha, will be published by Yale University Press under the title Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture in 2009.
