April 2020 The following conversation was produced by ArteEast, a leading New York-based not-for-profit organization founded in 2003 that is dedicated to engaging a growing audience with the contemporary arts from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and its diaspora. Through public programming, strategic partnerships, and dynamic online publications, ArteEast is a forum for […]
Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s (Grey Art Gallery, New York University and Hirmer Publishers, 2020) was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. Read the book’s introduction below. Introduction: “No Longer a Horizon, but Infinity,” by Suheyla Takesh, co-curator of the exhibition and curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation. […]
In the early hours of June 28, 1969, only blocks from NYU’s Washington Square campus, the Stonewall riots began, helping to launch the modern LGBTQ+ movement. The lives of generations of NYU faculty, students, administrators, and alumni have intersected with and contributed to this movement, in groundbreaking change and heartbreaking loss. Fifty years later, join […]
By Shiva Balaghi, December 2008 “People moving along Tehran’s Pahlavi Avenue (now renamed Vali-‘Asr Avenue) in 1960,” recalled Parviz Tanavoli, “would have seen a gigantic sculpture on the balcony of one of the apartments that overlooked the street. Constructed from scrap metal, this assemblage depicted a man embracing a deer. The deer’s antlers were made […]
By Shiva Balaghi, December 2008 A textured black background merges into two abstract spheres—one layered in cold hues of blue and white, the other in warm hues of ochre and brown—evoking a night sky that contains within it the celestial bodies. Closer inspection of the surface of Siah Armajani’s painting Prayer for the Sun (1962) reveals […]
How did a self-described “dyed-in-the-wool Midwesterner” residing in St. Paul, Minnesota, come to donate over two hundred works of modern Iranian art to New York University (NYU)? Indeed, this group of works—part of The Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art at the Grey Art Gallery—constitutes the largest public holding of […]
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Cartographies. With texts by Paulo Herkenhoff, Ivo Mesquita, and Justo Pastor Mellado. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1993. Rooted Visions. With texts by Carla Stellweg, Teresa del Conde, Andrés de Luna, and Gobi Stromberg de Pellizzi. New York: Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 1989. Sullivan, Edward J. “Nahum Zenil’s Auto-Iconography (‘Mexican-ness’ […]