The greatest mirror of any place in the world, over the course of time, is its art. Art, in its myriad forms, is a time capsule—a small piece of the zeitgeist, the social, cultural, and political heart of a city or country at any moment in time. It is a story—a small, seemingly inconsequential one or a mammoth one with visible meaning. And to preserve those stories is akin to preserving history in its purest form.
The Middle East has been…