Salwa mikdadi biography of martin garrix

As Arab Modern art grows as a subject of interest among curators and scholars, the difficulties of conducting primary research on artists are becoming clear. These universities offer full four-year programmes and take both international and local students, with curricula that reflect the regional identity.

But al Mawrid is also the life’s work of Mikdadi, who grew up in Jerusalem and Kuwait to Palestinian parents.

Al Mawrid (which means “the watering place”) digitises the archives of Arab artists and critics, makes them publicly available and publishes translations of key Arabic texts into English.

“There is a big task ahead of us of redressing the gap in archival scholarship and heritage management,” says Salwa Mikdadi, the Palestinian American art historian who established al Mawrid.

“She is really a living legend in the world of Arab art. The sub-series for correspondence consists primarily of correspondence with artists, and with cultural and artistic organizations. And much of the writing about 20th-century Arab art is—unsurprisingly—in Arabic, which many researchers do not speak.

These challenges are being addressed by the al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, set up at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in 2021.

In the worst cases, researchers clean and piece back together the letters, journals, and sketches. Those scholars living in the Arab world need visas to access material in the West. She notes that many of the major routes into Modern Arab art, which al Mawrid defines as 1850-1996, are motivated by overlaps with European and American movements like Surrealism.

Families are reluctant to share personal records. Education City in Doha comprises branches of Georgetown, Northwestern and six other Western universities, while Abu Dhabi set up the Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi in 2006 and NYUAD in 2010. “The family keeps the original photographs and documents, which certainly have sentimental value.

Chief among these groups are the dossiers on individual artists that Mikdadi began compiling prior to the formation of the ICWA, and which make up Series 1, "Artists files (individual)." Arranged alphabetically by name, these files often contain biographical information about a given artist, including information about his or her exhibitions, press coverage, resumes of their work, as well as correspondence between the artist and Mikdadi or her colleagues at the ICWA, and images of the artists' most representative works, often in the form of color photographic slides, but also as postcards, photo prints, tear sheets from magazines, or other formats.

Mikdadi also worked to build knowledge of Arab artists in the US. In 1989 she founded the International Council for Women in the Arts (ICWA), which produced exhibitions and education programming around Arab art (both male and female). It draws a picture of 1960s and 70s Iraq—and expands wider, to be a first-hand account of the US invasion of the country and the couple’s attempts to hold on to their artistic selves even amid war and exile.

Investment in education

From a larger perspective, the work of al Mawrid reflects the investment over the past 20 years of wealthy Gulf states into research and education.

“There is inequity among scholars in access to these sources of material. She has been collecting material since the 1980s and 90s, when she travelled across the Arab world to interview artists and document their work.