In Memoriam

Irene “renIe” A. BIermAn-mcKInney
(1942-2015)

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 164-166

Writing obituary notes is an expec-tation when one is as senior as I am, but when the subject is your 
closest friend for three and a half decades, 
your intellectual mentor, and your collab-
orator on a wide range of projects the task 
is very hard, very sad but necessary. This is 
the case for me in preparing what follows.

Born Irene Abernathy, Renie attended 
as an undergraduate Western College 
for Women, which is now part of Miami 
University in Ohio. She then went on 
to take an M.A. in Middle East Studies at 
Harvard and then a certificate in Arabic 
from AUC. Renie then went to work on 
her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, 
which had no one in Islamic art history. 
In fact Renie is the only major scholar of 

her generation in Islamic art history who 
was not trained by either Oleg Grabar at 
Harvard or Richard Ettinghausen in New 
York. This was already a clear sign of her 
independent mind. 

 B y  t h e  m i d - 1 9 7 0 s  s h e  w a s  R e n i e 
Bierman resident in Portland, OR. For the 
next half decade she taught courses on 
Islamic art at Portland State University and 
the University of Washington in Seattle 
where we met in 1977. Before I knew 
what was happening we had received a 
National Endowment for the Humanities 
grant to put on interpretive exhibitions 
of “Oriental” carpets in Portland, Seattle, 
Bellingham, WA, Spokane, WA, and Reno, 
NV with appropriate publications and 
public presentations. Then it was a 12 part 



In Memoriam: Irene “Renie” A. Bierman-McKinney

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 165

TV series on Islamic art shown extensively 
in the Pacific Northwest long before 
TV as an informational source became 
popular. All the time she was working on 
her University of Chicago Ph.D. which she 
completed in 1980.

A major change in her intellectual and 
professional life took place in 1981 when 
Renie had the opportunity to interact with 
a wide range of art historians as a fellow 
at Center for the Advanced Study of the 
Visual Arts, which is part of the National 
Gallery in Washington, DC. From there she 
went to UCLA for her first and only tenure 
track position retiring in 2012 as professor 
emerita. As an administrator Renie was 
known for her professionalism, openness 
and fairness and UCLA took advantage of 
those traits. She served as Director of their 
Middle East Center for 8 years and later as 
Chair, Department of Art History. Renie 
also had a reputation as an outstanding 
administrator based upon her service to 
ARCE as an interim director in Cairo. She 
was also the only art historian president 
of Middle East Medievalists (2001-2003) 
and during her career an active committee 

m e m b e r  o f  m a n y  o t h e r  a c a d e m i c 
organizations including ARCE and HIAA.

Her willingness to “think out of the 
box” and to create collaborative projects 
resulted in a number of international 
activities. She did an amazing job running 
two Getty Foundation grant in Istanbul 
and other parts of Turkey which included 
participants from over a dozen countries. 
As first a participant and then a co-director 
I can attest that under Renie’s leadership 
we worked hard, played hard, and even 
effectively got the then head of Egyptian 
antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, to Istanbul for 
a major public lecture and reception.

Renie created and then ran served 
a s  c o - d i r e c t o r  o f  a n  A R C E / F r e n c h 
Institute 4-year Research project in Cairo 
including 3 international conferences. 
H e r  p u b l i c a t i o n  r e c o r d  i n c l u d e d  7 
authored or edited books, 25 articles, and 
numerous exhibition pamphlets, catalogue 
descriptions and project reports. As her 
former M.A. student and friend Nasser 
Rabbat wrote “Her scholarship was both 
historical and interpretative, solidly rooted 
in research and knowingly conversant 



In Memoriam: Irene “Renie” A. Bierman-McKinney

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 23 (2015): 166

with theory. Her work on the role of public 
writing in Islamic iconography was path-
breaking; her study of the Ottomanization 
o f  c i t i e s  e x t r e m e l y  i n v e n t i v e ,  a n d 
her understanding of the function of 
conservation in our understanding of cities 
today constructively critical.”

As a mentor to graduate students, 
Renie set exceptionally high standards 
and deliberately limited the number she 
would work with. As Wendy Shaw, one of 
her Ph.D. students, reflecting the voice 
of her almost dozen Ph.D.s, wrote “Renie 
was my first teacher in art history, and 
I never realized how unique she was 
until I entered the world and discovered 
the breadth with which she enabled her 
students to think outside of the boundaries 
of disciplinarity. I think she lives on in how 
we approach our careers as well as in how 

we give shape to our work. I particularly 
appreciate her desire to engage students of 
all levels in excitement about discovering 
the world, her respect for the multiplicity 
of cultures and people in them, and her 
professionalism.”

For all her public career, Renie was a 
very private person. One day she told me 
that she had once published a piece of 
fiction for the New Yorker, one of the most 
prestigious literary journals in the United 
States. “Under what name did you write 
it?” I eagerly asked. “I forgot,” was her 
reply and the subject never came up again.

As one of her friends and admirers 
said to me “In short, Renie was a stylish, 
graceful, intellectual whirlwind.” May she 
rest in peace. 

 — Jere L. Bacharach