The Morgan Library & Museum in New York will open its much anticipated exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia” on October 14. In a series of sculptures, cylinder seals, and translated clay tablets, “She Who Wrote” will celebrate the Mesopotamian High Priestess Enheduanna, the first-ever named author in all of humanity’s history.

“The Morgan has done exhibitions on Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, the Brontés, so I thought we should do an exhibition on the first-known author ever, who happens to be a woman,” Sidney Babcock, the Jeannette and Jonathan Rosen curator and department head of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets at the Morgan, told ARTnews. “Most people don’t know that. It’s not celebrated. Why? School children know about Sappho, and she’s 1,000 years later for Pete’s sake!”

Daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the first ruler of the Akkadian empire of Northern Mesopotamia, Enheduanna was born more than 4,000 years ago. She was appointed to lead the cult of Nanna, a moon goddess worshipped in Sumer, a territory in the South of Mesopotamia that Sargon had conquered, and in her position as priestess wrote many hymns dedicated to goddesses.

“Her writings were copied for hundreds of years in the scribal schools,” said Babcock. In Mesopotamia, scribes were taught to write by copying hymns and myths that previous generations had written onto clay tablets.

The hymns of Enheduanna not only represent the first authored writing but the first example of the first person singular. In a hymn, Enheduanna describes a trial in which a usurper comes, throws her out of her complex, abuses her, and offers a dagger with which to kill herself. Thankfully, the goddess Inanna saves her, and she dedicates the song to her. Another hymn is the first-known example of the creative process being likened to birth. In the hymn, Enheduanna describes the birthing process, which starts with a lit fire in the nuptial chamber. She goes on to write:

“It’s not like any other city,” Mera Rubell told ARTnews, referring to Washington, DC. “To be bringing a collection that [my husband] Don and I built over the last 58 years to our nation’s capital is emotional. I have a lot of history with Washington. I was there for Martin Luther King Jr.’s march in 1963.”

Over a decade in the works, the Rubell Museum DC, which opens to the public October 29, is Mera and Don Rubell’s second private museum, after one in Miami. Housed in a building more than 115 years old, it will span 32,000 square feet. The architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle is renovating the building, which was the home, until 1978, of the Randall School, a segregated junior high school for African American children in DC’s Southwest neighborhood. (Alumni include singer-songwriter Marvin Gaye.) The building joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.

“We tried to preserve as much of the character and spirit of the school as we possibly could, because there’s something very special about saving a building of that age and in that neighborhood and [with] that history,” Mera said.

Unlike the Miami museum, which has 20-foot-tall ceilings and loading bays, physical limitations may affect what kind of art DC can showcase. Mera sees it as an opportunity to highlight works in the collection that may not shine as brightly in the Miami branch’s more expansive environs. “Many of the spaces—classrooms, teachers’ offices—lend themselves to very intimate work. You can feel that history,” she said.

The building was at one point considered as a new home for the now defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art, which had purchased it from the District in 2006 for $6.2 million, and then sold it to the Rubells in 2010 for $6.5 million. The Rubells also own the Capitol Skyline Hotel, down the street, which provided shelter for unhoused people amid the pandemic. (As part of the acquisition, the Rubells are also developing a residential building with close to 500 units that will share a courtyard with the museum; one-fifth of those apartments have been set aside for affordable housing.)

Beyond buying pieces by Rashid Johnson, McArthur Binion, Deborah Roberts, Carmen Herrera, and Barbara Kruger, Philadelphia-based collectors Michael C. Forman and Jennifer Rice have spent much of the past year seeking to help the local arts scene, still ailing from the pandemic. In 2021, knowing that the city’s larger organizations would likely find a way out of economic distress, Forman and Rice focused their attention more directly on artists and on small and midsize arts institutions. They launched the Forman Arts Initiative, an organization that will oversee a grant program called Art Works, and another project to bring Theaster Gates’s Monument in Waiting (2020) to the Drexel University campus; the sculpture, a response to the removal of Confederate and colonial monuments, will remain there through July 2023. Other initiatives currently in the works include an artist residency program and public art commissions.

“We’re committed Philadelphians,” Forman told ARTnews. “This is not just an opportunity; we feel it is an obligation to give back. If Philadelphia is to recover post-pandemic, one of the real value propositions is arts and culture, and small and midsize institutions are so important to the fabric of the city and their neighborhoods.”

Administered in partnership with the Philadelphia Foundation, Art Works is a five-year, $3 million grant program that will give two-year grants to four local artists and four nonprofits, with a focus on BIPOC and other underserved communities. Organization grants (for those with budgets between $250,000 and $5 million) will range from $50,000 to $150,000, while artists will receive unrestricted grants of $50,000 over two years.

“We felt that the best way to support the community in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods would be to support BIPOC cultural organizations and artists,” Forman said. “We focused on what we saw as shortcomings in the city’s funding for arts and culture, and how we could best leverage our resources.”

Even before the onset of the pandemic, the Forman Arts Initiative brought together various stakeholders in Philadelphia’s arts community to “listen and learn about the challenges they face and the opportunities they saw for how our organization could be most impactful with our support,” he said. “We’ve always been of the view that the art is a shared resource.”

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