Journal

For much of the last century, Arab art has been written about, exhibited, and categorized through someone else’s lens. Labels like Islamic art, Middle Eastern art, or Orientalist painting may feel familiar, but carry with them histories of power: colonial taxonomies, Eurocentric frameworks, and the authority of Western institutions deciding how Arab creativity should be understood. These terms were never neutral, they shaped value, legitimacy, and perception in ways that still echo today.

Yet across the Arab world and its diasporas, artists, curators, and writers are pushing back. They are creating new vocabularies, rejecting reductive categories, and positioning Arab art not as an exotic appendix to European art history, but as part of a living, global dialogue.