About Us
al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi is a research center and archive dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the visual arts of the Arab world. Founded in 2020 on the principles of dialogue and collaboration, the Center’s research interrogates the concepts, practices, and institutions of education and display developed by Arab artists in response to the immense transformations of the 20th century. Through a range of activities that include fellowships, research projects, conferences, and publications, as well as the construction of a unique free open-access digital archive available on the NYU Special Collections repository, al Mawrid is a significant resource for scholars, independent researchers, and educational and art institutions. The Center operates under the Arts and Humanities Division at NYUAD.
Arab Art Archive
al Mawrid is centered around the construction and management of the Arab Art Archive, which acquires primary source materials pertaining to modern art across the Arab world, between 1850 and 1995. The Center works with artists, their families, collections, galleries, arts organizations, and other custodians throughout the region and around the world to digitize and produce research from a range of documentary material—including artist writings, journals, correspondence, exhibition materials, newspaper clippings, and photographs—pertaining to the history of modern art in the Arab countries.
Research
The Center serves as a unique hub for innovative and scholarly research that connects regional artistic practices with global historical and theoretical frameworks. In collaboration with local and international art institutions and scholars, the Center addresses key gaps in scholarship that aim to develop new paradigms from within the lived histories of the region. The focus on regional perspectives situates research into an expanded and revised chronology of early modern and modern forms of the region’s culture. It moves away from presumed accounts by focusing on the region’s contribution to modernism beyond art historical and historical assumptions.
Pedagogy
A major aim of the al Mawrid is to investigate paths and practices for teaching art based on regional theoretical perspectives. al Mawrid contributes to the teaching of the history of modern art in the Arab world by contributing to the design of syllabi structured by the analytic categories it develops. Additionally, the Center works with NYUAD faculty to identify and activate primary source material relevant to a range of political, cultural, and intellectual research themes already underway on campus. Faculty and students at NYUAD and other local universities actively engage with the Center’s unique materials for coursework, research, and conferences.
History
The Arab Art Archive builds upon an initiative led by Salwa Mikdadi in the mid-1980s, under the name of ICWA/Cultural & Visual Art Resource, to archive and study the art of the Arab world. That initiative involved documenting artists’ responses to a range of social, political and environmental issues, notably wars in Lebanon and Iraq, and the field research it entailed resulted in the creation of an artist-database, audio and video interviews, and publications now housed in the Salwa Mikdadi Papers at the NYU Library.
