Our Mission:

Mihrab Islamic art is a privately owned Islamic-eastern art & pottery gallery  dedicated to providing information on Islamic arts and architecture. With a strong commitment to research and service, MIA strives to offer a Web presentation of the highest quality and to promote the awareness of Islamic arts as a humanistic study, recognizing the inter-relationship between the arts and other academic disciplines.

MIA seeks to encourage Islamic arts research in all dimensions by encouraging our members and friends to contribute and be actively involved in MIA service to communities both within and beyond the Cyber-world. In keeping with the mission of this gallery, MIA is committed to serving our customers and Cyber-friends, while developing and maintaining excellence and diversity by attracting volunteers, nationally and internationally.

            "Given the disturbing level of animosity between the West and much of the Islamic world, can increased appreciation of Islamic art in the West help bridge the cultural divide? Is that notion overly optimistic? Perhaps. But since the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, interest in understanding the Islamic world through its art has been growing."
-Alan Riding, New York Times, April 6, 2004

In 2004, Mihrab Islamic Art was founded in response to this call. Committed to the belief that a culture's art can provide the truest reflection of its worldview and serve as a platform for peaceful secular dialogue, this informative site aims to bridge this cultural divide by an unprecedented secular public education effort that will make knowledge about the diverse arts from all across the Islamic world uniquely accessible to a wide global audience.

(MIA) is a not-profit secular public education initiative with a mission to reach and educate a wide audience about Islamic culture through its cosmopolitan artistic heritage - over fourteen centuries of cultural expression from across a wide geographical expanse stretching from Europe to Asia. 

(MIA) initiated its mission via the creation of a digital Gallery.  The (MIA) presents a powerful new tool for replacing the perception of Islamic culture as unknowable and therefore alien with a widely accessible medium for the appreciation of Islamic culture and.

Building on best-of-breed technologies for online presentation of material culture, MIA’s gallery will meet its goal of delivering an enhanced understanding of the Islamic world with a comprehensive online resource that aggregates multiple collections of Islamic art (both public and private) in one place, presents context and perspective on the whole of the collection, and enables easy interaction with the art and the ideas it represents.  

Working in collaboration with Artists, private collectors, art historians, major museums, foundations researchers and universities, MIA offers global audiences a vital resource for Islamic art and culture by providing information in various media: digital images of diverse art work complemented by traditional museum didactics as well as articles, essays, podcasts, and audio casts by leading experts, documentary films and relevant scholarly materials.  This platform will additionally serve as a means of creating a dynamic online community. 

The website is designed to serve the needs of diverse Muslim and non-Muslim audience ranging from the casual browser, to the student, teacher, curator, connoisseur or scholar; anyone seeking to locate, view and learn about arts from the Islamic world.
 
An advisory board of Artists, collectors, teachers, and curators of Islamic art guide MIA’s expansion and content offerings.  The website will grow via a collaborative program be­tween local/global artists, web designers, art advisors, coordinators & collectors. (MIA) is hoping to expand its scope to include local exhibitions, public programs and more extensive educational initiatives targeted to the needs of a diverse constituency.