The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston celebrates the culmination of a 15-year initiative to expand their displays of Islamic art with the opening of two permanent gallery spaces (on 5 March). Hundreds of objects from the museum’s permanent collections as well as long-term loans from the collection of Hossein Afshar and the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait are on display. Highlights include a North African Qur’an manuscript in Maghribi script, dating to around 1318, and a 19th-century Persian mirror case, decorated with gul-u-bul-bul, or the rose and nightingale – a popular motif in Persian literature and painting that symbolises spiritual love and divine connection. Find out more on the MFAH’s website.
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The many faces of Mary Magdalene