The Ziggurat Splits the Sky,

2025

My process is like an excavation in reverse: handmade, built up, and moving forward while looking back. It simultaneously redraws the past and imagines the future. I take inspiration from the archives of Howard Crosby Butler, Class of 1892 (1872–1922), archaeologist and professor of architectural history at Princeton. Photographs from his excavation of ancient Sardis in present-day Turkey—near my birthplace of Aleppo, Syria—show my would-be Bedouin ancestors posed among fragments of columns and figural sculptures that persisted in the ruins for millennia.

This sculpture traces the form of an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat—a mammoth structure built by humans to ascend and meet the divine. My ziggurat, however, is permeable and fragmented. Its entrance aligns with the Museum’s entrance below, inviting visitors to imagine they are entering a sacred and ancient space. It rises above a blue mosaic sky, within which the calm face of Medusa looks upward, recalling the Antioch mosaic in the Museum.

Diana Al-Hadid, artist