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Maymanah Farhat
Allegory of a Revolution: José Clemente Orozco’s “The Trench”
![[Detail of José Clemente Orozco’s “The Trench” (1926). Photographed by the author.]](/content_images/3/sm_detailofthetrench.jpg "[Detail of José Clemente Orozco’s “The Trench” (1926). Photographed by the author.]")
José Clemente Orozco was the oldest of Los Tres Grandes, the celebrated modernist painters who led Mexico’s twentieth-century muralist movement. Among “The Big Three,” he was also the least politically dogmatic and the most outwardly pessimistic. Whereas Diego Rivera idealized the armed struggle of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), having missed the deadliest periods of combat while active in Cubist circles in Paris, Orozco was haunted by the carnage and chaos he had ...
Keep Reading »Palestine Up Close and at a Distance
In Ramallah, Running Guy Mannes-Abbott and Samar Martha, editors Black Dog Publishing, 2012 In his 1997 memoir I Saw Ramallah, Mourid Barghouti identified the early stage of what is now called the Ramallah “bubble” or “syndrome.” Writing on the state of Palestine just a few years after the Oslo Accords, Barghouti locates a “mirage” or “idea of Palestine” that distracts native inhabitants. Ramallah, it is argued, has been redeveloped with a focus on gross ...
Keep Reading »Zaha Hadid: Black Square, White Cube, and the Twenty-First Century Museum
![[Zaha Hadid's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Image by Paul Warchol (2012). Copyright the photographer. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects]](/content_images/3/sm_PaulWarcholBroad1.jpg "[Zaha Hadid's Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. Image by Paul Warchol (2012). Copyright the photographer. Courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects]")
The staircase of Zaha Hadid Architects’ recently opened Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University in East Lansing is sleek and straightforward. Its intention is functional; its design is simple (as simple as a contorted, suspended mass can be). A departure from the use of a traditional grand stairway as a means of announcing the authority of an American cultural institution, its narrow path cuts through three distinct levels of sensory experience, as each ...
Keep Reading »Etel Adnan at the Base of the Mountain
Etel Adnan 12 September – 28 October 2012 Callicoon Fine Arts, Manhattan Roughly fifteen miles north of San Francisco, across the city’s iconic burnt-orange Art Deco masterpiece, is Mount Tamalpais, another Bay Area icon. In the surrounding areas of this unassuming mountain lived the Coastal Miwok Indians—a now landless people—who (as popular legend would have it) once claimed that an evil witch lived atop its peak in order to deter early European settlers from ...
Keep Reading »مواقع الظلال: عمل حديث لجنان العاني
مواقع الظلال: عمل حديث لجنان العاني 28 آب، 2012- 10 شباط، 2013 قاعة آرثر إم. ساكلر- معهد سميثسونيان تعرض قاعة آرثر إم. ساكلر في العاصمة واشنطن ثلاثة عروض فيديوية لأعمال حديثة للفنانة عراقية المولد، جنان العاني. يقدم المعرض الفردي الثاني في سميثسونيان لجنان العاني، المقيمة في لندن، (أقيم المعرض الأول في 1999) والمعنون “مواقع الظلال” لزواره لمحة في زاوية جديدة من عمل جنان المبني على الصورة، وهي زاوية طورتها في عمل بحثي عنوانه "جماليات الغياب: أرض بلا ...
Keep Reading »Dia al-Azzawi's "Sabra and Shatila Massacre"
Earlier this year, London’s Tate Modern acquired “Sabra and Shatila Massacre” (1982-83), an epic mural-sized drawing by pioneering Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi. Sprawling as it is towering and engulfing, the artist began the massive work after news surfaced that between two and three thousand Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were strategically murdered in and around the refugee camps of southern Beirut in 1982. While creating “Sabra and Shatila Massacre,” al-Azzawi was also ...
Keep Reading »An Introduction to Helen Zughaib's "Stories My Father Told Me"
“Stories My Father Told Me” is a series of twenty-three gouache paintings by Lebanese-American artist Helen Zughaib. Based on the memories of her father, Elia, who was born in Damascus in 1927 under the French Mandate, this large body of work is filled with the recollections of his early childhood in the Old City of the Syrian capital and the subsequent years of his youth that were spent in the Lebanese towns of Zahle and Marjayoun. Beginning in 2003, Helen and her father ...
Keep Reading »Shadow Sites: Recent Work by Jananne Al-Ani
Shadow Sites: Recent Work by Jananne Al-Ani August 25, 2012—February 10, 2013 Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Three recent video installations by Iraqi-born artist Jananne Al-Ani are currently on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington DC. The second Smithsonian solo exhibition for the London-based artist (the first was held in 1999), Shadow Sites provides viewers with a glimpse into a new direction of her photo-based practice—one ...
Keep Reading »Amal Kenawy (1974-2012)
![[Amal Kenawy. All images courtesy of Gallery Misr, Cairo unless otherwise noted]](/content_images/3/sm_Bild022.jpg "[Amal Kenawy. All images courtesy of Gallery Misr, Cairo unless otherwise noted]")
On 19 August, leading Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy died from a battle with advanced leukemia. Globally recognized for a staggering body of work that explores the relationship of the individual to the incorporeal and physical nature of reality, Kenawy was respected among her colleagues for effortlessly combining video, installation, sound, and performance while challenging viewers to partake in deeply personal journeys that often venture into emphatic socio-cultural ...
Keep Reading »Portrait of America: Kehinde Wiley at the Jewish Museum
The gap between propaganda about Palestine in contrast to the reality I know as a Palestinian has made me wary… The most serious failing in political art is that it does not make clear whose side the artwork is on. When such clarity is lacking the benefit defaults to those currently in power. —Samia Halaby (Arab Studies Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1989) Punctuating several galleries of the Jewish Museum in Manhattan are the vibrant paintings of art world superstar ...
Keep Reading »Bio
Maymanah Farhat is an art historian who has written widely on modern and contemporary Arab art. Her essays have been featured in monographs, exhibition catalogues, e-zines, and journals. Her reviews have appeared in Monthly Review, ArtAsiaPacific magazine, and Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, among others. She was the West Asia editor of ArtAsiaPacific magazine's annual Almanac from 2006 to 2009, covering the year in art for 14 Middle Eastern countries. As part of her work for a commercial art space in the Middle East from 2009 until 2011, she authored over 150 artist bios and profiles for half a dozen auction catalogues.
Based in New York since 2005, she has curated several exhibitions for non-profits in the city, including the South Asian Creative Womens Collective's 14th annual exhibition at Cuchifritos gallery in lower Manhattan. In 2010, she co-curated New York Chronicles at the Virginia Commonwealth University Gallery in Doha, Qatar. Maymanah is the co-editor of Jadaliyya's culture page.
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