“Petite December” 2020, Small Works for the Holiday Season

Asma Naeem is an art historian and chief curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Previously she was a curator of prints, draings, and photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

Specializing in American and Contemporary Islamic art, Naeem is particular interested in the effects of displacement and dispossession, the history of technology, and the sensorial imagination of both artist and beholder. She holds a B.A. in art history and political science from Johns Hopkins University, a J.D. from Temple University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland. Before returning to art history, she practiced law as a prosecutor in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.

Forthcoming from University of California press is her book, Out of Earshot: Sound and Technology in American Art, 1847-1897, which urges scholars to think in new and more expansive ways about relations among the visual arts, sound technologies, and the senses of sight and sound.

She has been invited to be the keynote speaker and lecture at the Courtauld Institute, University of Minnesota, and University of Rhode Island, and has delivered papers at numerous conferences such as the American Association of Museum Curators, College Art Association, American Studies Association, and the Southeastern College Art Conference. At the 2010 College Art Association conference, she co-chaired a session titled, “Sounding American Art: Patterns and Possibilities.”

Naeem has taught an array of courses, including Modern European Art, American Art from the Civil War to the Present, and Contemporary Islamic Art. The latter has led to her current book-length study, tentatively titled, “Leaving Yourself Behind: The Partition of India and its Aftermath in American Art, 1947 – 2007.” Based on this research, she has published an article on the transcultural mobilities of Margaret Bourke-White and Zarina that appears in the 30th anniversary issue of American Art in 2017.