Amir H. Fallah: Portrait of a Museum

About the Exhibition

What do objects tell us about who we are and what’s important to us?

If you prompted someone to make a portrait of you using the objects around you, what would they pick and why? Amir H. Fallah: Portrait of a Museum asks precisely this question using objects from the MSU Broad Art Museum’s collection on the occasion of its 15th anniversary. 

Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Iran; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist whose work reimagines the genre of portraiture and what constitutes a portrait. In Fallah’s early photographic series Forts (2006), he visited friends and family and re-arranged objects in their homes into something akin to a still life. Fallah photographed his arrangements, and his documentation serves as a person’s portrait based on objects of significance to them. Fallah follows a similar logic in his paintings, such as Looking Out (2023), where a pair of binoculars becomes a clue to tell us more about the person featured in the painting.   

To celebrate the MSU Broad Art Museum’s 15th anniversary, Fallah has been commissioned to craft a portrait of our museum. Debuting in this exhibition, Fallah’s portrait will creatively re-envision the development of the museum’s collection in relation to the many community members who have shaped it since the first work of art was gifted to the university in 1945 and attend to the important role of museums in caring for objects and histories. The commission will be at the core of this exhibition, juxtaposing Fallah’s paintings with works from the museum’s collection, including recent acquisitions and works never before exhibited. As Fallah intervenes in and responds to the MSU Broad Art Museum’s collection, the result is a portrait of a museum—a still life that imagines our museum as a sum of its objects shaped by its constituents, and a vessel for object-based storytelling. 

You’re invited to come see our portrait and discover new ways of thinking about stories, histories, museums, and our collection through unexpected and exciting encounters with art. 

Amir H. Fallah: Portrait of a Museum is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Rachel Winter, Ph.D., assistant curator, and Amir H. Fallah, with support from Natalie Beglin, curatorial research assistant, and Nat Swartz, former curatorial research assistant. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.