Margaret S. Graves, "Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics" (Princeton UP, 2026)

About this episode

Dr. Margaret Graves discusses her book on the fabrication and forgery of Islamic ceramics in the context of art history and global capitalism.

In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) 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.In this stunning work of art history, Dr. Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications—as modern as they were believed to be medieval—moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly…

People in this episode

Guest: Margaret S. Graves

Topics covered

• Islamic art
• ceramics
• forgery
• fabrication
• colonial era
• art history

Keywords

• Islamic ceramics
• forgery
• fabrication
• art history
• colonial market
• antiquities

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Princeton University Press

Books & works: Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics

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