Nada Shabout
University of North Texas, Art Education and Art History, Faculty Member
- Nada Shabout is a Regent Professor of Art History and the Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural St... moreNada 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). She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics, University of Florida Press, 2007; co-editor with S. Mikdadi, New Vision: Arab Art in the 21st Century, Thames & Hudson, 2009; and co-editor with S. Rogers and A. Lenssen, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. She is also founding director of Modern Art Iraq Archive. She has written extensively on Arab art historiography and Iraqi modern and contemporary art. Notable among exhibitions she has curated: Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, 2010; traveling exhibition, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, 2005-2009; and co-curator, Modernism and Iraq, 2009. In 2017, she received The Crow Collection of Asian Art’s Achievement in Asian Arts and Culture Award, and in 2018, the UNT Presidential Excellency Award. Her research has been supported, among others, by: 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. Shabout was the Project Advisor for the Saudi National Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2019. Shabout is on the Board of Directors, Visual Art Commission, Ministry of Culture, Saudi Arabia (2020-2023), the Board of The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII), and the College Art Association (CAA) Board of Directors (2020-2024). Her current projects include, leading an AMCA team, as part of the Getty Foundation Connecting Art Histories initiative, in support of “Mapping Art Histories from the Arab World, Iran and Turkey,” coediting with Sarah Rogers and Suheyla Takesh, Modern Art in the Arabian Peninsula, and working on a new book project, Demarcating Modernism in Iraqi Art: The Dialectics of the Decorative, 1951-1979, both under contract with the American University in Cairo Press.edit
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<jats:p>Madiha Umar was the first Iraqi woman to receive a governmental scholarship to travel to Europe, where she officially studied education but also began art lessons. Subsequently, she pursed art education in Washington, DC, at... more
<jats:p>Madiha Umar was the first Iraqi woman to receive a governmental scholarship to travel to Europe, where she officially studied education but also began art lessons. Subsequently, she pursed art education in Washington, DC, at both Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University. Umar made her debut at the Ibn Sina Exhibition held at the Art Institute in Baghdad in 1952. The exhibition included four other women artists. Umar participated with 48 paintings, which introduced the contextualization of the Arabic letter in Iraqi modern art. Umar has been credited with the initiation of the use of the Arabic letter in art through a number of works she started in 1944, thus considered a precursor to horoufiyah, the style of visual manipulations of the Arabic letter in fine art widely employed during the second half of the twentieth century and a long-lasting trend. A naturalized Iraqi from Syrian parents, she was an Iraqi diplomat's wife who studied and exhibited in Washington, DC, while her husband was on post there.</jats:p>
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<jats:p>Madiha Umar was the first Iraqi woman to receive a governmental scholarship to travel to Europe, where she officially studied education but also began art lessons. Subsequently, she pursed art education in Washington, DC, at... more
<jats:p>Madiha Umar was the first Iraqi woman to receive a governmental scholarship to travel to Europe, where she officially studied education but also began art lessons. Subsequently, she pursed art education in Washington, DC, at both Corcoran School of Art and George Washington University. Umar made her debut at the Ibn Sina Exhibition held at the Art Institute in Baghdad in 1952. The exhibition included four other women artists. Umar participated with 48 paintings, which introduced the contextualization of the Arabic letter in Iraqi modern art. Umar has been credited with the initiation of the use of the Arabic letter in art through a number of works she started in 1944, thus considered a precursor to horoufiyah, the style of visual manipulations of the Arabic letter in fine art widely employed during the second half of the twentieth century and a long-lasting trend. A naturalized Iraqi from Syrian parents, she was an Iraqi diplomat's wife who studied and exhibited in Washington, DC, while her husband was on post there.</jats:p>
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<jats:p>Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Kadhim Haidar studied art at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad after receiving a degree in Arabic Studies from the Higher Institute for Teachers in 1953. Later, in 1961 and 1962, he pursed a BA in... more
<jats:p>Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Kadhim Haidar studied art at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad after receiving a degree in Arabic Studies from the Higher Institute for Teachers in 1953. Later, in 1961 and 1962, he pursed a BA in theatre design and graphics at the Royal School of Art and Graphics in London. After his return from London, he taught at the Institute of Fine Arts in 1962 and the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1968. He founded the Design Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1974 and chaired the Visual Arts Department there in 1981 and 1982. He was a contributing writer and a poet for various publications including Al-TakhtitwalElwan [Sketching and Colors], which became a standard textbook at the academy.</jats:p> <jats:p>Haidar's work explored key political shifts in Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s through a re-imagination of popular religious symbolism, which was seen in opposition to the new secular modern thought favored by his generation of artists, and thus had been absent from the work of modern Iraqi artists. His most noted series of work is Melhamet al-Shahid [The Martyr's Epic], which is based on a poem he wrote in Baghdad in 1965. Through his negotiation of the martyrdom of the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, al-Hussayn, at the battle of Karbala, Haidar's work gained added significance for contemporary Iraqis within the turbulent political years of coups d'état and unsettled affairs.</jats:p>
<jats:p>Born in Tikrit, Iraq, Rafa al-Nasiri earned a bachelor's degree in printmaking from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1959. From 1959 to 1963, he pursued further studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in... more
<jats:p>Born in Tikrit, Iraq, Rafa al-Nasiri earned a bachelor's degree in printmaking from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1959. From 1959 to 1963, he pursued further studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he studied printmaking with Huang Yu Yi. In 1967, he received a scholarship from The Gulbenkian Foundation to study at the Gravura in Lisbon, between 1967 and 1969. After returning to Baghdad, he headed the graphics department at the Institute of Fine Arts. He was a founding member of the New Vision Group (Jama't al-Ru'yya al-Jadidah) in Baghdad, along with artists Dia Azzawi, Mohammed Muhriddin, Ismail Fattah, Hachem al-Samarchi, and Saleh al-Jumaie. After leaving Baghdad, al-Nasiri taught at the University of Yarmouk, Jordan, and at the University of Bahrain for several years before settling in Amman, Jordan. He is the author of a number of essays and books on Iraqi graphic art and Iraqi modern art. His experiments in printmaking have influenced the subsequent generations and played an instrumental role in the development of a strong tradition of Iraqi printmaking.</jats:p>
<jats:p>Born in Ankara, Turkey, Jewad Selim descended from an Iraqi family of artists. His father is Hajj Mohammad Selim, his sister Naziha Selim and brothers Suad and Nazar Selim, each an accomplished artist in their own right. One... more
<jats:p>Born in Ankara, Turkey, Jewad Selim descended from an Iraqi family of artists. His father is Hajj Mohammad Selim, his sister Naziha Selim and brothers Suad and Nazar Selim, each an accomplished artist in their own right. One of the most prominent and influential figures in the formation of the Iraqi Modern art movement, Selim was awarded a government scholarship to study sculpture in Paris (1938–1939), in Rome (1939–1940), and in London at the Slade School of Art (1946–1949). In Baghdad, he was a founding member of the first art society in Iraq, the Society of the Friends of Art in 1941, a founding member of the Institute of Fine Arts in 1949, the Baghdad Group of Modern Art in 1951, and the Society of Iraqi Plastic Artists in 1956. He worked at the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities, where he spent several years restoring Sumerian and Assyrian reliefs. His most mature paintings date from the 1950s, after which he concentrated solely on sculpture. He headed the Department of Sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts until his death. His style inspired the imagination of virtually an entire generation of younger artists and his influence is still evident today. Selim's work evokes a shared humanity and defines a sense of historical identity and national character, which inspired many Iraqi artists to emulate his artistic methods.</jats:p>
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This introductory essay by members of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey provides a quick overview of the significance of the 1967 defeat of Arab military forces by the Israeli army for the... more
This introductory essay by members of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey provides a quick overview of the significance of the 1967 defeat of Arab military forces by the Israeli army for the historiography of modern and contemporary Arab art. It then details a recent turn to more critical engagement with that historiographic framework, as exemplified by the 2012 conference The Longevity of Rupture: 1967 in Art and its Histories, and introduces the four articles published in ARTMargins that came out of the conference.
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Designers and architects argue that interaction in public spaces is the product of relations between physical, cultural, social, and aesthetic components. As an art historian, my interest in and understanding of the production of public... more
Designers and architects argue that interaction in public spaces is the product of relations between physical, cultural, social, and aesthetic components. As an art historian, my interest in and understanding of the production of public space is necessarily linked to its visual construction and to public art in particular. Urban planners have always included art in public spaces as a means of forming relationships between the people and the space. Governments have similarly understood the political significance of public space and its power to make meaning and have commissioned art accordingly. This essay reflects on the role of aesthetics and public art in the production and transformation of the modern public space in the Arab world by considering two examples from Cairo and Baghdad.
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The perception of the Arabic letter in art has gone through many changes from the Islamic civilization to the modern age. Following the political and socio-cultural changes of the 19th and 20th century, the Arabic script lost its... more
The perception of the Arabic letter in art has gone through many changes from the Islamic civilization to the modern age. Following the political and socio-cultural changes of the 19th and 20th century, the Arabic script lost its sacredness. After decades of limited existence in traditional craft, the Arabic letter reappeared in modern Arab art around the middle of the 20th century on nationalistic bases. The Arabic language had acquired a high value during the age of colonialism as a symbol of national identity, a unifier; this value only grew stronger with time. The letter was also a signifier that aided twentieth-century Arab artists in their artistic identity crisis. A number of art groups—such as the Baghdad Group of Modern Art, formed in 1951—were established with their focus on a search for a local or national art style through ‘istilham al-turath,’ seeking inspiration from tradition. The Arabic letter became the means for connecting artists’ present with their past and allow...
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ART IS INDEXICAL OF SOCIETY. It is expressive and reflective of its culture. Visual production has a continuous dialectical relationship with culture. Within the spaces shaped by this dialogic, new identities are negotiated and contested... more
ART IS INDEXICAL OF SOCIETY. It is expressive and reflective of its culture. Visual production has a continuous dialectical relationship with culture. Within the spaces shaped by this dialogic, new identities are negotiated and contested forming new and renewed cultural icons to the extent that Mieke Bal argues that "art thinks culture."1 The dynamics of this relationship is impacted by political upheaval and is further complicated by outside interference often reflecting a new imposed modus operandi. Contemporary Iraqi art in the aftermath of the US-led invasion has taken on various roles, be that of resistance, documentation, testimony, prediction and hope. In the postmodern era of image-making, possibilities of interpretation are as limitless as those of creation. Jean Baudrillard' s definition of simulacrum, for instance, shattered the eternal art historical concern with the relationship between origin and copy. He argued that a movement from "representation&q...
"New Vision" is the most comprehensive, scholarly and in-depth survey yet of what is currently happening at the cutting-edge of art in the Arab world. Five essays explore in depth contemporary Arab production, followed by 90... more
"New Vision" is the most comprehensive, scholarly and in-depth survey yet of what is currently happening at the cutting-edge of art in the Arab world. Five essays explore in depth contemporary Arab production, followed by 90 superbly illustrated profiles of key artists, organizations and galleries. Perfect for all scholars, students and lovers of art, as well as all those interested in the broader Arab cultures, it is set to become the touchstone publication on this increasingly important and exciting subject.
The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) project is a participatory content-management system to share, trace and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. The focus of the project is thousands of works of art, many of... more
The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) project is a participatory content-management system to share, trace and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. The focus of the project is thousands of works of art, many of them now lost, from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad. MAIA is unique in that it not only documents the lost artworks, but also provides tools for community enhancement of those works, allowing contribution of stories, knowledge and documentation to the system, as well as syndication of the content elsewhere on the web.
Nada Shabout is an Assistant Professor of Art History with a background in architecture, fine arts, and the humanities. Her area of specialization and scholarship are in modern and contemporary Arab art and cross-cultural Studies. Her... more
Nada Shabout is an Assistant Professor of Art History with a background in architecture, fine arts, and the humanities. Her area of specialization and scholarship are in modern and contemporary Arab art and cross-cultural Studies. Her area of current research is ...
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... 15 The list of works they offer includes paintings by Abdul Qadir al-Rassam priced at $3000 ... the placement of the new statue atop a pedestal where a statue of Saddam Hussein once stood ... artist Salah Abbas who borrowed the $200... more
... 15 The list of works they offer includes paintings by Abdul Qadir al-Rassam priced at $3000 ... the placement of the new statue atop a pedestal where a statue of Saddam Hussein once stood ... artist Salah Abbas who borrowed the $200 at the time from the sculptor Taha Waheeb to ...
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This essay, written collectively by the co-editors of the publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), provides an account of the book's conception, institutional backing, and multi-year process of research and... more
This essay, written collectively by the co-editors of the publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), provides an account of the book's conception, institutional backing, and multi-year process of research and editing. The authors reflect in particular on the translational politics that obtain in the global art world and the museum sector as well as the academic study of the modern Middle East.
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The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) is a private, non-profit, non-political, international academic organization. Our goals include initiating the much-deserved recognition of a... more
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) is a private, non-profit, non-political, international academic organization. Our goals include initiating the much-deserved recognition of a neglected and misrepresented field, and to open up institutional spaces for discussion, research and study. We seek to connect artists, scholars and others from around the world by sponsoring conferences, holding meetings, and exchanging information via a newsletter and website.
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The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) is a private, non-profit, non-political, international academic organization. Our goals include initiating the much-deserved recognition of a... more
The Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) is a private, non-profit, non-political, international academic organization. Our goals include initiating the much-deserved recognition of a neglected and misrepresented field, and to open up institutional spaces for discussion, research and study. We seek to connect artists, scholars and others from around the world by sponsoring conferences, holding meetings, and exchanging information via a newsletter and website.
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This essay, written collectively by the co-editors of the publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), provides an account of the book's conception, institutional backing, and multi-year process of research and... more
This essay, written collectively by the co-editors of the publication Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), provides an account of the book's conception, institutional backing, and multi-year process of research and editing. The authors reflect in particular on the translational politics that obtain in the global art world and the museum sector as well as the academic study of the modern Middle East.
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The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) project is a participatory content-management system to share, trace and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. The focus of the project is thousands of works of art, many of... more
The Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA) project is a participatory content-management system to share, trace and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. The focus of the project is thousands of works of art, many of them now lost, from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad. MAIA is unique in that it not only documents the lost artworks, but also provides tools for community enhancement of those works, allowing contribution of stories, knowledge and documentation to the system, as well as syndication of the content ...