This talk explores the context of in which Iraqi Modernist in the mid twentieth century introduced a prolific negotiation of the decorative as signifier of both continuity and modernity, to resolve their crisis or representation that is modernism. The decorative was the solution that connected their past with their present through what became coined as the concept of istilham. Registration is required.

Nada Shabout is a Regent Professor of Art History and the Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative (CAMCSI) at the University of North Texas. She is the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey (AMCA) and founding director of Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA). She is a curator and author of numerous essays and books, including Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, 2007; coeditor of New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, 2009; and coeditor Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, Museum of Modern Art, 2018.

Notable among exhibitions she has curated: A Banquet for Seaweed: Snapshots from the Arab 1980s, CVAD Gallery, UNT, 2022- 2023; When Images Speak: Highlights from the Dubai Collection, Itihad Museum, 2021- 2022; Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, 2010; traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009; and co-curator, Modernism and Iraq, 2009. Major awards of her research include: Senior Humanities Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World 2023; Getty Foundation 2019; Writers Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation 2018; The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) fellow 2006, 2007, Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, 2008.

She is currently working on a new book project, Demarcating Modernism in Iraqi Art: The Dialectics of the Decorative, 1951-1979, under contract with the American University in Cairo Press. Shabout is on the Board of Directors, Visual Art Commission, Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia; the Board of The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII); and the College Art Association (CAA) Board of Directors (2020-2024). Shabout is the recipient of the 2020 Kuwait Prize for Arts and Literature from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences. 

Scheduled

Zoom