November 10, 2020 Congratulations to Lucie Taylor, first place winner in the Grey Art Gallery’s NYU Graduate Writing Prize competition; Ruqaiyah Zarook, second-place winner; and David Lamb, honorable mention. The Prizes were awarded for the best essay or poem by an NYU graduate student in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab […]
November 10, 2020 Congratulations to Lucie Taylor, first place winner in the Grey Art Gallery’s NYU Graduate Writing Prize competition; Ruqaiyah Zarook, second place winner; and David Lamb, honorable mention. The Prizes were awarded for the best essay or poem by an NYU graduate student in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the […]
November 10, 2020 Congratulations to Lucie Taylor, first place winner in the Grey Art Gallery’s NYU Graduate Writing Prize competition; Ruqaiyah Zarook, second place winner; and David Lamb, honorable mention. The Prizes were awarded for the best essay or poem by an NYU graduate student in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the […]
November 10, 2020 Congratulations to Azeki Ali, first place winner in the Grey Art Gallery’s NYU Undergraduate Writing Prize competition; Amelia Grace Annen, second place winner; and NiccolòAcram Cappelletto, honorable mention. The Prizes were awarded for the best essay or poem by an NYU undergraduate student in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from […]
November 10, 2020 Congratulations to Azeki Ali, first place winner in the Grey Art Gallery’s NYU Undergraduate Writing Prize competition; Amelia Grace Annen, second place winner; and NiccolòAcram Cappelletto, honorable mention. The Prizes were awarded for the best essay or poem by an NYU undergraduate student in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from […]
November 10, 2020 Congratulations to Azeki Ali, first place winner in the Grey Art Gallery’s NYU Undergraduate Writing Prize competition; Amelia Grace Annen, second place winner; and NiccolòAcram Cappelletto, honorable mention. The Prizes were awarded for the best essay or poem by an NYU undergraduate student in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from […]
Original program date: June 18, 2020. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Arab countries were transformed through decolonization, the rise of nationalism, socialism, rapid industrialization, and wars and mass migrations. At the same time, artists were revitalizing their practices, finding inspiration in Arabic calligraphy, geometry and mathematics, and local topographies. Hannah Feldman, Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern, focuses on abstract art in Algeria; and Alex Dika Seggerman, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History, Rutgers University–Newark, on figurative art in Egypt. Moderated by Sarah-Neel Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Maryland Institute College of Art.
Original program date: June 4, 2020. Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor of History of Art, Cornell University, and Nada Shabout, Professor of Art History, University of North Texas, explore how the artists in Taking Shape “reterritorialized” the Arabic alphabet and made its aesthetic more accessible to the larger world, not only in detaching Arabic letterforms from Islamic calligraphy and religious history but also in liberating them from their semantic functions. In stripping Arabic letters of their former meanings, artists enabled them to signal modern (pan-)Arab identity and the decolonization of culture. Moderated by Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor of Art History, New York University.
Original program date: May 28, 2020. Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, discusses this independent, UAE–based initiative, which he established in 2009 to study, preserve, and exhibit modern art from the Arab world, and to foster critical conversations about regional modernisms. Suheyla Takesh, a curator at Barjeel and co-curator of Taking Shape, discusses her role in organizing the exhibition, framing her investigation of modernism’s development in mid-20th century North Africa and West Asia within today’s rethinking of the canon of abstract art. Moderated by Lynn Gumpert, director of NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and co-curator of the exhibition.
April 23, 2020 By Karim Zidan As in the rest of New York City, the crowd at the Grey Art Gallery was dense and tightly packed, a mixture of ages, backgrounds, and ethnicities gathered together at the opening reception for the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World 1950s–1980s, which took place on January […]