“The future of America, its openness and understanding that we, as a nation, have always depended has thrived on the energy, ideas and struggle of immigrants like Alberto Ledesma. The promised land can only be envisioned by the newcomer to our shore. Ledesma’s story, its powerful images, is needed now more than ever in an age of rising xenophobia and continual exploitation.” —Andrew Lam, winner of the PEN Open Book Award
“Alberto Ledesma’s gorgeous drawings have fascinated me for a long time. Now his stunning work has become a book for the ages.” —Luis Alberto Urrea
Persian Carpets: the Nation As a Transnational Commodity tracks the Persian carpet as an exotic and mythological object, as a commodity, and as an image from mid-nineteenth-century England to contemporary Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Following the journey of this single object, the book brings issues of labor into conversation with the politics of aesthetics. It focuses on the carpet as a commodity which crosses the boundaries of private and public, religious and secular, culture and economy, modern and traditional, home and diaspora, and art and commodity to tell the story of...