Ottoman History Podcast - The Jeweled Gun of Sultan Mahmud I

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

with Ashley Dimmig hosted by Abbey Stockstill and Musa Kazım Azimli | The jewel-encrusted musket of Mahmud I is one of the most popular pieces at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In this episode, curator Ashley Dimmig joins us to discuss her experience curating Islamic art and the manifold mysteries of the ornate 18th-century gun once owned by an Ottoman Sultan. These mysteries include practical questions about its design and the contents of its secret compartments as well as more conceptual puzzles about past provenance and effective presentation of Ottoman artifacts to international audience in an American city. In addition to discussing the fascinating history of the gun, Dr. Dimmig reflects on the exciting challenge of curating connections that allow every museum visitor to find an entry point into an exhibit.    « Click for More »

Hi everyone, I'm Abby Stockstall. I'm Moosa-Kazimli. And welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. We are here with a very special guest today, Ashley Dimmig, who is currently the director of the Crossman Gallery and an art history lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater. But she's here visiting us today to talk about the reinstallation work she did while she was the Wheeler-Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. She was there from 2019 to 2022, and she is the co-curator of across Asia,

arts of Asia and the Islamic world, the permanent galleries that just opened in April of 2023. She's been visiting us here at the University of Virginia to talk about the reinstallation work, as well as the community input that she received. when working on this reinstallation to make this collection more current, more relevant for Baltimore's local population. And in her presentation of this incredible work that she's done, one of the standout objects

was a jeweled gun set belonging to Mahmoud I. It dates from about 1732, 1733, although it has a lock from about 130, years later. And when she was talking us through the gallery installation, one of the things that you showed us was a heat map of where your viewers and visitors to the gallery spend the most time. And far and away, the spot where visitors spent the most time was in front of this incredible musket. Now, I should let our listeners know that this is not your average gun by any means. It is encrusted with jewels. Very beautiful. Yeah. And best of all,

secret compartments. Exactly. Oh, yeah, we're going to have to talk about this. So Ashley, thank you for being with us here today. Thank you for having me. And could you tell us a little bit about where this gun comes from? How does it end up in the Walters? Right. Well, I'll start with how I ended up at the Walters too because for three, three and a half years, I was the steward of this amazing object. And, you know, as part of the long history of museum stewardship and the gun had been in the collection since before it was a museum, right? So the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore was founded by Henry Walters upon his death in 1931. He gifted his properties and collection to the city Baltimore for the benefit of the people of Baltimore. Among the most absolutely remarkable objects

is this jeweled gun. As you mentioned, so not only is it gold encrusted and has jade plaques, it has over a thousand emeralds, rubies, and diamonds each, as well as one little bit of sapphire, which is my birthstone, so I love it. But Henry Walters acquired this through a dealer called Robert S. And he had a shop in Istanbul called the Oriental Museum. And we know so much about how this came into the collection of Henry Walters because, and this in my experience almost never happens, that we have a written record of the lore surrounding this gun. And in a purple leather bound manuscript writing the inventory of objects that Henry Walters purchased from Robert Pardo and the grand finale of which was. this gun with its remarkable histories and myths associated with it.

What sort of information have you seen in that hanging document? Well, it's interesting because, you know, as historians, we can read into it what the truths might be and what some of the embellishments are and where it's just outlandishly a story to be woven and told, right? As I've said many times, you know, we often forget about the role of dealers in the sale of art and how collectors amassed their collections that then eventually ceded museums, right? So the dealer Robert S. Pardo wrote everything down, and he dedicated several pages of this manuscript to this gun. And he, as he tells it that Mahouda I called out to all of the gunmakers of the Ottoman Empire

to create for him a gun that essentially solve a riddle, right? So there's, and this is part of, of the ingenuity of it all that actually underscores Mahmoud the First's other artistic patronage. And the riddle was that he wanted a gun that he could use to kill an animal without shooting it and with which he could sign decrees while on the hunt. And as the story goes, every, you know, gunsmith in the land brought in a gun and the sultan said, no, this is not good enough. I declare the gun destroyed and the gunmaker disgraced. Until one day this genius gunmaker brought to him this gun and before the sultan's could say, destroy it, he opens a hidden compartment in the butt of the gun and pulls out a bejewal dagger

and says, here, you can kill an animal without shooting it. And another hidden compartment, he pulls out a also bejeweled pen set. So with the pen box, a pen, pen, knife, ink well and all this, so that he could sign decrees while on the hunt. So for our listeners, if you're listening online, I recommend that you take a look at the pictures that are accompanying this podcast on the website so you can follow along a little bit.

Looking at this gun, first of all, it's enormous. I mean, how long is this thing? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's hefty. Yeah. The caliber is like 58 millimeters. It's substantial. Right. And then thinking also about whether or not you could have even used to this gun, the caliber of bullet that would have been needed and the size of the gun itself, could he have actually shot it if he wanted to? Well, that's a good question. And one that people often ask. And this is working with my colleagues at the Walters, especially Angie Elliott and Gregory Bailey, you know, asking this question of like, A, was it ever shot or B, could it ever have been shot? And there's no physical evidence that indicates it ever was shot. But there is every indication that it could be shot. But the caliber as large as it is, likely would explode all of the gems off of it if ever it were shot, right? So it is. Feeding the purpose. And this is actually the story in the manuscript goes on to talk about how the Sultan used this to shoot birds from a secret compartment in the palace, this and that. No, that never happened. Right. So that's where we can definitively say with scientific research, this was never shot. So there was no, you know, hunting of birds from the palace window with this gun. But looking at this secret compartment that's opening out of the butt of the gun, we've got the dagger, right, with its bejeweled handle. And what is this on? the handle itself. In terms of the motifs or the materials, both. Ruby's and emeralds are encrusting it as it is every other surface. There is some poetry inlaid on the blade itself, you know, kind of just generally

benedictory poetry. But actually, calling out the dagger is interesting because Mahmundavirs is also famous for commissioning the top cup of dagger. Exactly. That's what I was thinking of. The film, Topopi. What was it, 1974, I think? but yeah um so this is part and parcel with um sulte mhmu the first's artistic commissions of being completely

over the top and bejeweled to a degree kind of unknown before and next to that we have the pen set right which comes with the stylus itself we get we get the knife that's going to cut the nib sharpen the nib um we even have Is that two nibs? Well, so those two little objects at the top there are actually related to the function of the gun, again, if it ever did function. One is a spoon, and this is where the sapphire comes into play. The bowl of the spoon is a carved out sapphire that would have been used to measure out the gun powder and the other tool used to kind of clean out the gun powder after the fact. So the tools are there to use and fire the gun as a weapon, but they were never used. In your presentation, you said that two hidden compartments exist, but do we know what is inside of the second one?

So if we're looking at this image, you can see that, so the butt of the gun opens up, and on the part, the flap that opens, there's another flap that reveals a diamond tour. of Mahmoud the first and two diamond doors kind of open up to reveal the dagger and the pen set. But on the top is yet another

secret compartment. And this is a bit of a mystery. And our conservation team at the Walters has done x-ray imaging and all this kind of study of it. It seems to be a metal-lined compartment of some kind, but they've never been able to open it.

Interesting. Yeah. So we don't, we still don't know to this day as far as I'm aware. So like opening it will do damage the. Yes. Okay. Yes. We don't want to force anything that can't be undone and in. No visible hinges. No visible locking mechanism. But what are some of the theories that have been put out about what's in it? Oh, I think there's been a few potential, you know, like whispers of could this be like especially if we're going to lean into dramatic myths and legends. Like could this be a compartment for poison? Or is the secret of it the riddle itself? What did you see when you did the x-ray?

It was just the metal box around the compartment? Okay, so no clue even what's inside the metal box. Right, exactly. But it's only through the x-ray analysis of this gun that you were able to even find this secret compartment, right? Right. And this is part of the important work that you and the conservation team did in preparing for this gun to go back.

back on display. Well, a lot of this research was actually done in preparation first for the Pearls on a string exhibition that Amy Landau curated in 2015-16. Her exhibition focused on individuals' stories and highlighting kind of the people behind the art objects, including Mahmoud the First and the jeweled gun set. But in the permanent galleries, it had been in kind of display cases that were off to the side behind the elevators really kind of in a not ideal space. And it was displayed with a lot of other items that it kind of, it just didn't have the prominence. I felt like it should. Behind the elevators.

It's a weird layout of a museum. Who's going to go look behind the elevators? Only if you're waiting for the elevator in a weird spot, can you actually see them. But we gave it its due prominence in the new galleries that you can still see at the Walters on the fourth floor. and it really has all the bits and pieces that go along with it as well as a video showing how those different compartments open and how each element is pulled out. Yeah, and you can take a look at that video on the website. So I recommend that you do so. So Pardo basically gives Walters this story, right?

Yes. He's the one who's put together this document that he gives to Walters when Walters purchases the musket. And what does this document even say about who's making this? That seems to be such an important part of the legend, right? This call that goes out from Mahmoud I first across the Ottoman lands for artisans to make this weapon that solves a riddle, as you so eloquently put it, right? So what do we know, if anything, about the makers of this semi-mythical weapon? Well, and this is where the historical research actually is more interesting than the myth that came along with it. So scientific research and analysis, again, and the research of this, you can read in a chapter on the Pearls on a String exhibition catalog,

written by Bora Kaskinare, Inverostem, and Tim Stanley about the gun and its historical cultural context. But the close analysis has shown that on the barrel of the gun, and this is not mentioned in that document, document at all. No names are given other than the sultans. And there's some indication of provenance, which we can get into as well. Classic, classic example of it being all about the patron. Right, right. In the official documentation. Right. Of this call. Of setting the riddle, setting the standard. Right. But at no point are these kinds of objects made by a single individual. It is always going to be a team of people. And on the barrel, there is an impressed stamp of a gun. Smith. All that we know of him is his name is Ismail. So we can presume he is an Ottoman subject, Muslim, and that's about it. That's all we can know of him. But what makes the gun most extraordinary is all of the gem and gold work, right? And that, we're fairly certain, was done by, or at least overseen by an Armenian Christian, Hovana's Agadusian, who was the chief goldsmith under Mahmwood

the first. He's working for the court. And how does he come to be part of the Ottoman court if we know? If I'm remembering correctly, I think he actually was working as Chief Goldsmith under Mahmoud's predecessor, so Ahmed the third, and remained in that position under Mahmoud the first court. And that's, is that usual within an Ottoman sort of courtly setting to have quite such a diverse community of artisans working for them? Absolutely. Especially. I mean, we're talking in the 18th century and moving into the 19th century. Armenians are extremely prominent in court art and architectural patronage. I mean, they're really developing new aesthetics, small scale to large scale and working very closely.

So I think this is probably a work of his design as much as Mahmoud I first as he's often credited as kind of coming up with the concept of the gun. But aesthetically, I think we can owe a wheel a lot to to do. for this. So it was a result of a collaborative multi-ethnic workshop culture in the Ottoman court. Exactly, that workshop culture, as you say. So this is where the myth of the single genius falls flat, but it actually reveals a much deeper history of collaboration, workshops, you know, expertise, master craftsmen, and, you know, all of it in the whole hierarchy within the Ottoman court artistic production. What about experimentation? I mean, do we have any other comparative examples of anything even remotely like this?

I have no idea. And if any listeners out there do know, we should talk because I have not seen anything like this. Now, if you know anything about me, I am a textile specialist. I am not an arms and armor specialist in terms of Ottoman art history. But this has captured my attention as I captured many people's attention. I just have never seen anything like it. I never used the word unique to describe anything because it's ultimately meaningless.

But this, as far as I am aware, is unique. As you said, it's unique and very colorful. It's not like an ordinary weapon to use. So I think with merging all of artistic beauty with an object of as a design as a weapon, it's unlike the one they are using for the hunting, right? So what this musket shows about the Ottoman court culture or ceremonial culture in that sense?

Right, like to even call it a weapon almost just doesn't do it justice, right? That it really isn't its function at the end of the day. And I should say, too, that while we know the names of Duzian and Ismail, there likely were many more people involved too, right? Sure. So the jewelers. The, right, the jewelers, the locksmith, the, there probably was a clockmaker involved, an armorer stockmaker.

Exactly, no, all of this. And so those are just the names we know, but we know just by looking at it and analyzing it, that there was definitely many more forms of expertise involved in the making of it. but it's all of the it's bejeweled kind of wondrous nature to my mind absolutely almost takes it out of the realm of what we define as a weapon right and this is where a lot of that historical cultural research coming out of the pearls on a string catalog came to the fore that with the time period that mahmoud is ruling is you know there's military success and a lot of stability at this time in the empire but there are changes and he is a sultan who's continued to be the reformist movements of his predecessors and sort of trying to walk to paths of demonstrating stability and continuity, but also innovation and reform. And I think, you know, and maybe we're reading too much into this, but I think you can read all of that into this gun, that it's showing using weapons, much like, you know, the girding of the sword ceremony, right?

Weapons are a part of Ottoman ceremonial from the beginning and have played an important role in defining what a sultan is to his people, right? Whether or not he's actually running through somebody with said sword or shooting them on the battlefield, right? And so especially in the later period, moving away from the concept of the Ghazi warrior sultan, but more toward the reformist or, you know, he's on the hunt. He still has that prowess with a gun potentially. But, you know, we're using it in more diplomatic ways and not so much on the battlefield, right? like maintaining diplomatic relations with Europe rather than trying to conquer westward.

So you're really thinking about this as this kind of moment, the gun is being emblematic of this moment of transition, that when we think about a weapon as an art object rather than as a functional weapon, we're moving into a different kind of, not only ceremony, but a different kind of understanding of what it means to display and bear arms. Right. Right. So I wonder if you could maybe speak a little bit to the myth of violent conquest and how an object like this

both speaks to that heritage and counters it. And this is one of the topics we talked a lot about with my advisory committee when we were working on the installation was trying to see weapons, yes, not so much as, especially weapons that end up in art museums that are inlaid with gold and gem encrusted, right? They're likely not meant for the battlefield. They are ceremonial or performative in some way, which is a different function. but their existence as weaponry still bears meaning in these contexts, even if they're not literally being used in that way. And so one way that we balanced that in the galleries was to show a series of weapons primarily purchased in or through the Ottoman context

in a display that mimicked the way that the Ottomans displayed weapons in their early museums. So thinking about the display of historical weaponry, even within the historical context of the Ottoman Empire. So it's like war tools, but also form of art for them. Yes, both and. And I don't think it would have been seen necessarily as that separate. And it's interesting that this is coming from the Ottoman context, right? This is not an orientalist buyer coming in

and stripping these objects of meaning. or power, they are adopting this method of display almost wholesale from the Ottoman dignitaries, merchants, bourgeoisie that they're interacting with. Is that fair to say? And it's some of the other tidbits that are in this manuscript that explain what was thought to be the history of this gun talks about Abdulaziz taking it to Paris when he went to meet with Empress Eugenie. probably didn't happen.

But again, like the fact that this, the dealer is telling these stories, like, he knows Ottoman history, right? He knows what's going on and is kind of using some nuggets of truth to weave a tale that's plausible, right? And he gives the provenance of it as coming through the collection of Fuad Pasha. And so it's like, it's, he's, there's some nuggets of truth in this and, um, groundings in history, even if we can kind of tell what's embellished and what's, you know, the, the, the weaving of tails. So Pardo hangs over this like so dramatically as this teller of tales,

this figure who's really determining how Walters is going to interpret this weapon. What do we know about him? Oh, that's a good question. My colleague Anna Clarkson did some research on this and we think that he's actually potentially coming through Italian context like he's coming from Italy but he's he's living and operating in Istanbul. Hmm. With this dealership and he sold Walters actually quite a bit of arms and armor not just this gun and each of which has its own little tail, um, corresponding with it.

But Pardo is still a bit of a mystery. But what I think is most interesting is that this is just the happenstance that he wrote this down. This had to have been, to my mind anyway, this had to have been the norm that when dealers were found a buyer with money, you know, a collector who was looking to acquire things, that the dealers played this role that it often gets lost in history. We think of collectors as coming in and buying and taking, but the dealers are selling. And they have a role to play in the movement of objects across continents and collections as well. And we just happen to have Pardo's tail. It's just this like survival that gives us a little bit of insight into potentially

what is more the norm that we could delve further into the histories of dealers. Yeah. So story is as valuable as items. I agree. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm thinking too then about what kind of maybe even hidden role these dealers are playing in shaping the field of not only of collection, but then of the field of Ottoman art history and what's forming those collections and then what gets studied in those collections in European museums, American museums. The dealers themselves have acted as curators of what's getting bought. Exactly. That's a good way to put it. The development of collections in art museums, Ottoman art, Islamic art more broadly, are very much the result of the historical moment, especially in the late 19th, early 20th century, as collections are being dissolved in the Ottoman Empire. And they're trying to raise money and things are being bought and sold. And it just sometimes is just the mistakes of history that end up forming these collections that become iconic in the field, become the field. itself, which then are published and exhibited and become the canon almost by mistakes of history.

If we turn back to the 18th century when they designed this mascot, in your presentation, there was an interesting point about the sultan's spinal deformity and its relation with this weapon. Could you say more about that? Yeah, and this is one of those, and it kind of comes back to the use of the gun or purported use or potential use. We do know that he had a physical disability that maybe would have prevented him from using or firing the gun,

this gun of such scale and such caliber. But, you know, was that the reason it was never shot or was it because it was never shot because it was meant to be preserved and used in regalia and ceremonial context? So, but the potential for shooting, whether he could physically do so or not, or the gun was meant to be shot or not,

it still bore the weight and meaning and significance of a sultan potentially armed and ready to go into battle at a moment's notice, right? Whether that was actually the case or not, because like I said at this time, we are in a pretty stable point in time. He's not having to contend with, you know, a battle on every front as some sultans were.

So he was a successful, stable sultan and had a particular predilection for bejeweled things, as well as things that demonstrated a kind of ingenuity. And that's an aspect of it that I think warrants more exploration here of where did this concept come from, right? Yeah, it's a multifunctional object. Right, like the hidden compartments. And so there's like the mystery and wonder and revelation of it,

as well as the ingenuity of having it all fit together just so. And so like where who is the the mind behind that? And it seems whether it's Mahmoud himself or simply that he was drawn to objects like this. I mean, at least that much is clear whether or not he's the one that really came up with the concept. But I think to my mind, there's there's a signature of a curiously minded intellectual sultan behind this. there's a nice parallel between the sort of puzzle box nature of the butt of this gun, right, with all of its secret compartments. Right, though. And when you look at the butt of the gun where the knife and the pin set would come out, you can see that within one secret compartment, there are just more, right?

It keeps opening up and opening up and opening up. So it really is like a puzzle box. And there's a nice parallel with that. And then the story that Pardo has set up, right, of Mahmoud sending out this call of a riddle to be solved with an object. I really like the way whether or not, you know, Pardo's making this up or not, right? It creates a very convincing narrative and a convincing parallel that I think in terms of a kind of literary style, is very coherent within this tradition. And what we don't know is, you know,

how much of this did Pardo make up? Or is this something he actually heard? Is this an oral history that happened to be written down? And, you know, how was it embellished over time? Who told who, you know, these are things that we'll never really know, but it begs the question and makes me curious. What's fascinating in here, I'm seeing like,

it's this mascot has, like a very contradictory elements like a dagger with the poetry and the pan and the weapon and versus art making so it tells many different stories and that also shows that how the items are powerful objects to to express the like tell the stories behind it right right so in that sense I think the exhibitions and creating an exhibition is like another form of storytelling in addition to academic researching and writing. And in that sense, would you have any like suggestions or tips for the early career researchers or students who wants to try another medium in addition to their book?

projects or articles. Well, I'll start by saying something you said reminded me that, you know, in the conclusion of the chapter by Rustam Stanley and Kaskinner, you know, they talk about that. This gun in all of its seemingly odd disparate elements actually embodies what makes a good Sultan at this time. This concept of marksmanship as well as, you know, being erudite and well, you know, and you can write and you can diplomatic. diplomatic and like the dagger is also kind of you know an elegant weapon of another age kind of thing

so that these all kind of embody what creates a good sultan in the 18th century but in terms of the gallery yeah like I said so it was a star object in the pearls industrying exhibition it's a star object in across Asia arts of Asia in the Islamic world which is the permanent galleries at the Walters now and we try to let it tell all these stories And so of the many star objects that are featured across the installation, what we did was what we did was we wanted multiple labels that talked about different aspects of a particular object to hear from multiple voices. And this is something museums have been doing more and more of. And so for this particular one, of course, as the curator, I wrote one of the labels talking about just the history

and what it was. Our conservator, Gregory Bailey, talked about this mystery compartment. The accessibility advocate at the Walters, Rachel Leeds, talked about Mahmoud I first as a disabled Sultan. And then we had Khachid Moridian, who is an Armenian scholar, talk about that Armenian artistic contribution

and achievement within the Ottoman context. So we wanted to touch on all these different threads of history because museums are a venue, like a brick and mortar venue for public scholarship. Right. We have the expertise behind the scenes, but how do you communicate that to a public? How do you connect to audiences? And this is, you know, what my talk was about this morning, but also more broadly, we have to learn about the people coming into these spaces in order to teach them anything, right?

Otherwise, it just is left out in the ethel. So my advice to any curator or student coming up who is interested in this kind of work is to not just become an expert in the material, but think about your audiences. And that can be tough for academics when we're learning, when we're knee-deep and nose-deep in archives and books and dissertations to think with clear eyes and a clear mind, what does somebody think when they're seeing something from the Ottoman Empire? for the first time. It might be the first and only thing that they've seen, right? And so you kind of have to work with different colleagues and think about people, you know, visitor services or education to get a sense of where, how would somebody approach this and understand anything about the complexities of it and its history? Yeah, it's, it's, you're talking about multiple voices, right? And, and making sure that the multitude of voices are heard and this. And I think that was one of the,

the sort of standouts of your talk this morning about the reinstallation is the way you got so much involvement in thinking about how do we make this collection relevant? How do we make this collection matter to not just the Walters, the members of the Walters Museum, right? The people who are already buying it into the museum and big fans of the museum, but how do we make it current and relevant for all of Baltimore in all of its complexity. Right. And that was really, really fantastic.

Thinking about the gallery itself and the guns placed within it, I mentioned at the top of the podcast, the heat map that you showed with where people are standing and they're all coming in to see this gun. You've had some special visitors come and see this gun as well, haven't you?

Oh, yes. Like I said, it's garnered quite a bit of interest. And it was just in my first year at the Walters that we had a few, let's say, VIP visitors who were interested in checking this out, one of which, you know, self-professed Ottoman princess, Sainab Osman, who was married to before he passed Erichol Osman, the quote-unquote last Ottoman grandson of Abdul Hamid II, you know, born in the Ottoman palace before being, you know, exiled. But so she, she wanted to come see it. And she just traveled to Baltimore. We took it into stores so she could see all of its parts and components up close and, you know, not behind glass. And we just had a grand old time, like gushing, like just nerding out over this thing, right? And making those connections.

Did she have any input about the secret compartment? No. Oh, that would have been neat, though. The secret password for opening up the compartment. Exactly. That's what I'm wondering. No, but we just, you know, it's just when you can. connect with people and I mean I mean this podcast is an example too right of connecting with people over these kinds of objects and histories another special guest that came to visit again it was my absolute

pleasure and this happened my first year at the walters as well some armenian folks reached out to us um with concern about the fact that the armenian artistic contribution to the gun was not recognized in the gallery or online and this was what year 2019 okay so before things had been deinstalled before the new exhibition had gone up. Right. But the research had been done through the pearls on a string exhibition. It just never ended up in the gallery and we're all, you know, busy. And so it was an easy, you know, turn around to say, oh, yes, of course.

We'll update the label. We'll update, you know, the website. That took a day. You know, that was very a quick and easy solution. But we also saw it as an opportunity to invite these folks. So this was Carnig-Karconian, Chicago-based Armenian, Armenian, and, you know, international lawyer. And then Professor Levan Chakuzizian from Yerevan State University, who, so they came and we like with Zana Bosman, we pulled the gun off of view. We brought it

into the conservation lab so they could see it in person and we could, you know, look at all the different compartments and the conservators were, you know, playing around with it and, you know, opening and closing things. And then we just had a really nice conversation about it and shared with them copies of the catalog. And it just opened up a really warm, lovely conversation. And then they very graciously invited me and the director of the Walters Art Museum at the time, Julia Marciari, Alexander, to Chicago. And we had a little bit of a shindig with the Armenian consulate there. And I was able to connect with more amazing folks like Hegnar Watanpaw at UC Davis. And I just, these kinds of opportunities don't always come up. And so when they do, you know, we should take advantage of them to make

connections, whether they're local to Baltimore or, in this case, international. Yeah, I think it just speaks to what you've been saying about the importance of these objects even now. Right. This is an object from the mid-18th century and people are still interested in it. People are still curious about it. And for some people, it has a very personal, very intense meaning. Yeah, a good cultural and heritage connections, perhaps even more important now than even in the time it was created in the 1730s. Yeah, for the connecting people, that brings me the fascinating point that you pointed out about the collection and connecting the collection with the Baltimore. You said that like there were, I mean, in your presentation, I see that you give such an effort to, you give such an effort to,

to connect some object with the stories of people in the Baltimore's history to make them attachable with the collection, right? Yeah, yeah, one of the other instances where we were able to use multiple voices in the gallery as well as draw those connections to people's lived experience was through the college student advisory board. And so this was a different advisory group

that operated kind of across museum collections, but some students self-selected to write labels for certain objects in the collection, including a 19th century incense burner. And collectively, they wrote a label talking about how, and these are all students who had some cultural or familial ties to Istanbul in particular and talking about how the shape of the object reminds them of the ceramic pomegranate that like their grandmother had or the smell reminds them of walking past mosques in Istanbul. And so it was a lot about evoking memory and heritage, but also to hear a real person's story. And that's what I think often can be lost in museums is when we look at objects behind glass,

you know, it deadens them in a way, right? We don't picture what it's like to hold them or smell them or shoot them in this case. but to to hear somebody tell that story allows us to imagine a universe where we could and it helps you, it's almost like magical travel in your mind to Istanbul even though you're in a gallery in Baltimore. I am so taken with this idea of the idea of the scent scape

and the idea of experience of these objects because I and I think you probably feel similarly as an academic as a scholar my field work never feels as substantial until I'm talking about it with other people and what you've done with this installation with taking the voices of students immigrants and putting them next to these objects

is you've opened up a dialogue for visitors to the museum to have that kind of experience where they're not just sitting passively and observing this object, they're engaging with it with their peers, with their community within the gallery space. And that's what helps too when the labels aren't all written by just sort of this voiceless authority that is the museum, right? Where you can hear people speaking in first person and talking about their memories and their experience helps you to empathize

and imagine and connect with those experiences even if you've never had them yourself. So you left the Walters in 2022 and moved to Wisconsin, where you're now the director at the Crossman Gallery. And I'm wondering what were some of the biggest lessons you took away from the Walters that you are getting to put back into practice now as a museum director? What I've learned from Mahmoud the First as well as the Walters is diplomacy to me. Yeah, I mean, that's those connections. I mean, that is, it almost sounds trite in some ways, but until you're challenged to really enact, to enforce, or what I was saying? To forge said connections, it doesn't feel real until you're there. Another anecdote I'll give is, so what I talked about this morning, we taught one of the additions to the gallery that was a result of the advice.

Committee work at the Walters at the Walters sorry was to bring in the story of black Muslims in America and there was one woman likeisha Rahman who has a small business selling bean pies in Baltimore I wanted to talk to her I mean I tasted her pies they were delicious but I wanted to hear her and hear her story and see how you know this is another way to see how we can connect to the Muslims of Baltimore and I took her through the old galleries this is while we were still everything was still under construction. And I was so excited and nervous. And I was telling her about all the different highlight objects and my ideas for what the new galleries were going to look like. And I was like, she was walking around quietly as I was, you know, just excitedly telling her everything. And she kind of

turned around and said to me, she's like, yeah, I don't connect to any of this. Oh, oh, no. Yeah. And I was like, oh, oh, no. That's the worst thing you could hear. Okay. Okay. So then, you know, we kind of let it go. We talked a little bit. Then I got to hear her story. And then we sat down. We recorded the interview so that we could tell her story in the gallery, which there's a panel about her in the gallery now. And afterward, her demeanor changed entirely. And she had said, I was walking her out, you know, the back entrance of the museum. And she turned around and she just was like, thank you. No one's ever asked my story before. And so it's just allowing those venue for stories to be told to be shared Changes the space and change allows people to even be open to making those connections Whether it be with a bean pie or a gun a jeweled gun or whatever the case may be

And it's different it's going to be something different for everybody But I think that openness literally opens the doors for a lot of different things. And for any listeners who happen to be in the Baltimore area, if you go to the Walters now, Lakeisha Rahman's story is right next to a serving dish for sweetmeats that comes from 12th century Iran. So you've done this really wonderful juxtaposition

that I think a lot of museums are afraid to do, which is to take an object out of its historical context. And instead you've really leaned into that and said, no, we should be imagining these as objects that are used, as objects that are interacting with humans. And those humans all have a story to bring to these objects. And so that is one of the sort of standouts of the narratives that you've told within this gallery

about how we should be thinking of these objects. as not only artistic objects behind glass, but objects that are meant to be touched and tasted and experienced to be lived with. Exactly. They are artistic. In the case of the gun, right? This is a mental puzzle. Exactly.

No, and it's, you know, what we were trying to do too is that there's, so that there's something for everybody. Of course, you can't really have something for everybody in all the galleries, but where there's different entry points, whether you want to kind of, what did we call it, skim, swim, or dive, right? That if you want to kind of just bop through and enjoy, you know, you know, potentially like looking, reading of a story about pies, or you want to delve into the deep, nuanced, complicated history of a jeweled gun, that there's, there's an entry point for

anybody depending on your interests and prior experience. And that's why I kind of called it like curating connections, right? We're forging connections with people. And that's where history gets. told and stories get shared. So what are you up to now at the gallery? What's next? Oh, well, after spring break here, we're going to embark upon what we call our milestone exhibitions displaying the work of our graduating seniors in the gallery. Very exciting. Again, talking about making art relevant. Yes, exactly. So I have the pleasure of working in an art and

design department. So I'm teaching art history primarily to art makers, which is amazing and I love it. And then exhibiting their work, but then throughout the year, we also all curate exhibitions out of the permanent collection, or we'll do juries shows, things like that. And then every spring, which we just concluded is our shoe visiting artist program. This is named for Annette and Dale shoe. They donated, they gave a significant donation to the university so that every year in perpetuity we can invite a famous artist to campus to work with students and have an exhibition. And so the one we just concluded was Feijun, who is an AI artist actually out of Beijing and represented China and the Venice Biennale and came to Whitewater, Wisconsin to work with our students. And we had an

exhibition that was far beyond my own expertise because we had to create like digital immersive virtual gallery interactive spaces. Yeah, that I learned a lot this year. And as an Ottomanist? As an Ottomanist, I very thankfully received the Grubar Postdoctoral Grant last summer to be back in Istanbul and as well as visiting the tentmakers in Cairo because I'm working on transforming my dissertation on Ottoman tense, see my previous Ottoman history podcast episode about that into a book. So that's what I'm going to delve into intensive writing again this summer dust off, you know, the computer and get working on writing again. So in your world, you are in, with the objects and also like with research and writing, do you feel that these are the separate

worlds or the worlds that feed each other? Both, because sometimes, times you need to step away from if your brain is so deep in a problem that you feel like you can't solve at least for me I need to step away and do something else and whether that's curating a different exhibition or you know putting together a different paper or teaching a class like it helps to kind of change out your brain to do something different and have a fresh perspective but at the same time we're all always learning so even thinking about um this digital AI immersive exhibition I just did part of me like when I finished my dissertation which is now seven years ago uh I always wanted to and this is like this will require a lot of money from grants

sometime in the future but to do a to scan the tents and animate them virtually in a gallery space because they're they're unwieldy objects but these are these are pieces that would have a huge footprint if you were to try and install these in a gallery they are Not only that, but you have to install fabric on a monumental scale in a way that puts no weight on them. And the ones I've seen displayed, for example, in Dresden or in Krakow took them decades to install a single one because of the conservation and engineering that they require. I think Qatar had, at least for a little while, a partial Mongol tent installed. But as you say, it could only be up for a short amount of time and took an extraordinary amount of engineering to get up on the wall because these are textiles. We're not supposed to destroy them.

We're not supposed to put any weight or tension on them. And yet, when they would have been used, that's how they worked. That's how they worked, right? They're hanging from poles and posts. I mean, you would know more than I would about how these tents were put together. Yeah. I mean, there's the trellis tents and the guy rope tents and the Ottoman ones certainly used tension. So, yeah, so I've been noodling about how we could potentially use these emerging technologies to scan and virtually recreate Ottoman tents in a gallery setting, especially thinking of different kinds of illumination.

What would they have looked like in sunlight versus rain or winter versus summer or on a windy day when they're moving and breathing, right? to contextualize them using virtual technologies in a way that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. That sounds fantastic, and I want to come visit your exhibition. I'll let you know. Looking forward to it. Ashley, thank you so much for taking the time

to chat with us here at the Ottoman History podcast. Again, this has been a conversation with Ashley Demig, the director of the Crossman Gallery at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater. And she's been speaking with us about some work that she did. reinstalling the Islamic galleries at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Ashley, thank you for spending some time with us today.

Thank you. It's my pleasure.