The Walters Art Museum is among America's most distinctive museums, forging connections between people and art from cultures around the world and spanning seven millennia. The museum features a stunning array of objects, from richly illuminated Qur'ans and images of the Buddha, to captivating narrative paintings and artfully crafted ceramics and metalworks. Official publication in March 2023 celebrates the reopening of the Museum's Arts of Asia and Islam collections in the renovated and reinstalled 4th floor of the Centre Street Building. Arts Across Asia and Islam will be the first volume in a series of titles which break away from the traditional academic approach. It is built around themes that transcend period, form, locale and medium, and forms part of the Museum's wider initiative to focus resources on developing new ways of interpreting its collections.

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.