Sheila R. Canby, Curator at the Met Who Humanized Islam, Dies at 76

Sheila R. Canby, a leading authority on Islamic art who curated a humanizing portrait of Islam through its cultural treasures at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, offering an alternative to the hostile narratives of religion and politics after 9/11, died on Aug. 17 in Milford, Del. She was 76.

Her death, in a hospice facility, was from complications of lung cancer, her husband, John Voss Jr., said.

In the days following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, wrote Holland Cotter of The New York Times, “many art-loving New Yorkers felt impelled to visit the overlooked Islamic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, as if to get some grasp of a religion suddenly central to their lives.”

But in an awkward bit of timing, the galleries closed for renovation in May 2003 and did not reopen to the public until November 2011 — a decade after the attacks. By then, the museum had hired Ms. Canby, bringing her over in 2009 from the British Museum in London, where she had held a similar position as curator of Islamic art and antiquities since 1991. Part of her new job at the Met was overseeing the expansion and re-installation of the Islamic art galleries.

Days before the reopening, Ms. Canby told The Times that the attention and anticipation were probably driven “by news events that are focused mostly on war,” referring to echoes of 9/11, the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, tensions in Iran and the erupting pro-democracy movements of the Arab Spring.

“The history and culture represented by the objects in these galleries is still not known nearly as much as it should be,” she said. “The goal here is to change that.”

In a 2012 review for Artforum magazine, Nasser Rabbat, an architecture professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called the installation “a discreet bid to counter the negative rap that Islam and Muslims have sustained recently.”

Also in the collection are manuscript illustrations from “The Shahnama,” or Persian Book of Kings, a national epic written in 50,000 couplets by the poet Firdausi in about A.D. 1000. Ms. Canby, a scholar, researcher and writer, published an updated and lavishly illustrated 16th-century edition in 2014.

“There is always a tendency to vilify a people as if they have come out of nothing,” she told The Times in 2011. “But these things are humanizing. They show the beauty and achievement and even the sense of humor of a great culture.”

Sheila graduated from Vassar College with a bachelor’s degree in French art in 1970 and took a job at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she became enthralled with works from the Iran collection.

She went on to do graduate work at Harvard University, receiving a master’s degree in fine arts in 1976 and a doctorate in fine arts in 1981. One of her specialties was the Safavid dynasty of the 16th and early 17th centuries, in what is now in Iran — in particular, the miniaturist paintings and drawings of Riza-yi ’Abbasi of Isfahan, the focus of her master’s thesis.

The thesis became the basis of her book “The Rebellious Reformer” (1996), considered a groundbreaking assessment of an artist whose style — characterized by an emphasis on individual figures, an inventive calligraphic line and vibrant, earthy hues — transformed Persian aesthetics, said Navina Haidar, Ms. Canby’s successor as the curator of Islamic art at the museum.

Another of Ms. Canby’s publications, “The Golden Age of Persian Art 1501-1722” (1999), received the Farabi International Award from Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology, an honor The Tehran Times described as “a testament to the significant respect her work commanded within Iran.”

Ms. Canby retired from the Metropolitan Museum in 2019. In addition to Mr. Voss, she is survived by their son, Tobias Voss; and two sisters, Marjorie L’Allemand and Elizabeth Semple.

Before the Met’s Islamic galleries reopened, the museum, on the advice of the State Department, contacted 20 countries whose artifacts were to be represented. It also sought input from more than 40 scholars of Islamic art. But museum curators do not always have the power to influence geopolitics.

During the destruction of ancient sites in northern Iraq and Syria by the Islamic State and other Sunni extremists, Ms. Canby lamented to The Times in 2014 that she sometimes did not open her email messages because she found them “so upsetting.”

Even with the current friction between the United States and Iran, though, she remained highly regarded there. In a statement, Jebrael Nokandeh, the director general of the National Museum of Iran, called her death “a great loss,” saying that “her immense contribution ensures that her name and legacy will forever be enshrined in the cultural memory of both the Islamic world and global art history.”

Ms. Canby was “a living bridge between the West and Iran,” Ms. Haidar said in an interview.

“Without her contributions,” she added, “we wouldn’t have this insight in our divided times into what Persian culture is magnificently about.”