Exhibit: Ink, Stone, and Silver Light

A Century of Cultural Heritage Preservation in Aleppo October 1, 2025 – December 11, 2025 Maihaugen Gallery, MIT Ink, Stone, and Silver Light, an exhibition curated by Rami Alafandi, is now on open to the public in the Maihaugen Gallery of the MIT Libraries. Drawing on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fi Tarikh Halab (The River of Gold in the History of […]

Exhibition: Refracted Histories through Stained Glass

The exhibition “Refracted Histories through Stained Glass: 19th c. Islamic Windows as a Prism into MIT’s Past, Present, and Future,” curated by Rami Alafandi and Gwendolyn Collaço, is now on display in the Distinctive Collections’ Maihaugen Gallery. The exhibit features a set of striking gypsum and stained glass windows dating to the late 18th- to 19th century Ottoman Empire, which the curators discovered among numerous architectural artifacts from the earliest days of the Institute’s architecture program in the Rotch Art Collection, Department of Distinctive Collections. This discovery led to extensive research on the craft and the commissioning of contemporary works […]