Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Curator Emerita, Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, earned her Ph.D. in the history of Islamic art at New York University
in 1978. Her dissertation, entitled
“Medieval Maghribi Ceramics: A Reappraisal of the Pottery Production of the
Western Regions of the Muslim World” and supervised by Professor Richard
Ettinghausen, explored the glazed
pottery tradition in the Maghrib from the middle of the ninth until the middle
of the twelfth century to establish, for the time, a continuous and
interconnected glazed ceramic tradition in that region.[1]
Dr. Jenkins-Madina began her long curatorial
career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1964. Having received her B.A. from Brown
University in 1962, she continued to pursue her education while working at The
Metropolitan Museum, earning both her M.A. and Ph.D. during this time. From her initial appointment as Curatorial
Assistant, she rose through the ranks during her forty-year tenure as curator
in the Department of Islamic Art and was named Curator Emerita upon her
retirement in 2004.
Dr. Jenkins-Madina’s work includes the critical
revision and expansion of those sections dealing with the decorative arts and
the arts of the book in the second edition, published in 2001, of the
preeminent text, Islamic Art and
Architecture: 650-1250. These sections in the first edition,
published in 1987, had initially been written by her mentor and long-term
colleague, Prof. Richard Ettinghausen.[2] In 2006, she published Raqqa Revisited: Ceramics of
Ayyubid Syria,[3] an
important study using art-historical detective work, archival documents, and
scientific data to place these objects in a secure historical context for the
first time.
In addition to the permanent and temporary
exhibitions Dr. Jenkins-Madina helped to mount and publish at The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, she was also very actively engaged throughout her long career in
helping various countries in the Near and Middle East to present their own
material from the Islamic world. The
largest such undertaking was serving as the Project Director for the creation
and installation of Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyya in Kuwait which opened to great
acclaim in 1983. Dr. Jenkins-Madina
remains an active participant in her field.
Further, Dr. Jenkins-Madina made a generous
gift to Columbia University in honor of her late husband, Maan Z. Madina,
MESAAS Professor Emeritus and noted collector of Islamic art. The gift,
endowing a visiting scholar position – The Madina Scholar – open to
distinguished academics teaching humanities at institutions in
the Middle East whose work is grounded in the history of the Arab world,
reveals her dedication not only the art of the Islamic world but also to the
on-going and intellectually well-grounded study of its history. [4]
Sharon
C. Smith, Ph.D.
Program
Head
Aga Khan
Documentation Center at MIT
Cambridge,
MA
3
November 2016
[1]Marilyn
Jenkins, “Medieval Maghribi Ceramics: A Reappraisal of the Pottery Production
of the Western Regions of the Muslim World”, (PhD diss., New York University,
1978).
[2]
Richard Ettinghausen, Grabar, Oleg, and Jenkins-Madina, Marilyn. Islamic art
and architecture 650 – 1250. 2nd edition. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001.
[3]
Marilyn Jenkins-Madina. Raqqa
revisited: ceramics of Ayyubid Syria. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art;
New Haven: Yale University Press, c2006.