Archiving Donna Stein

Donna Stein’s memoir The Empress and I is a tale of two women who crossed paths and became united in a vision to make the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA, est. 1977) one of the most prominent collections of Modern Art in the world. The former queen and empress, Farah Diba Pahlavi (b. 1938), had a dream of establishing a global institution that fostered dialogue between modernist artists in Iran (then Persia) and in the Global North, as well as a new space of literacy and learning for the population en masse. The empress sought to enliven the local modern art scene while simultaneously engaging Iran in an international, intercultural exchange with some of the world’s most famous modern artists. Stein was asked to help with this vision because of her training and expertise in the art world in New York City; she would later take this professional skillset to Tehran to assist directly with the collections and protocols, alongside other important figures of TMoCA’s establishment, such as the architect and artist Kamran Diba (b. 1937). Stein’s book is filled with meticulous details and primary documents from the 1970s about her involvement in facilitating, advising, and building the collections of TMoCA, primarily the works on paper. More than 40 years later, letter excerpts, contracts, ledgers, and communiqués detail the many negotiations, processes, and persons involved in various transactions in New York City and Tehran that were all a part of TMoCA’s success as a major world institution. Stein keeps the reader’s attention by dividing the book into ten concise chapters and then by ending her own narrative with an in-depth interview with Farah Pahlavi that Stein conducted in 1990. In the memoir, Stein details how she was able to be part of this historic project. She had been part of the curatorial staff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and was awarded a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Museum Professionals to study world fairs and their global impact on cultures. In 1973, this research eventually took Stein to Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan, and these magnificent cities of the world awed her—the thrilling urban setting and many museums of Tehran, the Donna Stein, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art, Skira 2021, £21.45 paperback, 9788857244341