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. The first symposium was held in Richmond, Virginia in 2004. The second symposium, Rivers of Paradise: Water in Islamic Art and Culture, was held in Doha, Qatar in 2007. And Diverse Are Their Hues: Color in Islamic Art and Culture was the third biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art and was held in Córdoba, Spain in November, 2009.
The fourth bienniel Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art w was held October 29 – 31, 2011 in Doha, Qatar at the Museum of Islamic Art designed by I.M. Pei, where 12 speakers were invited to discuss specific objects in the Museum’s collection. The title of this Symposium was God Is Beautiful; He Loves Beauty, a Hadith from Muslim’s Sahih.
The first four symposia brought together over forty speakers to explore a single theme in Islamic art and culture. The speakers came from all walks of scholarly life and have included architects, artists, and scientists 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), Carole Hillenbrand, Professor of Islamic History and head of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh (2007), Jonathan Bloom, a Symposium organizer and shared holder with Sheila S. Blair of the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Norma Jean Calderwood University Chair of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College (2009), and Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and architecture critic for The New Yorker (2011).
