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.
The Weight of Names
Let’s start with the phrase Islamic art. For decades, this catch-all label flattened centuries of diverse artistic production, putting in the same category Abbasid ceramics to contemporary calligraphic experiments, all under a single religious frame. Art historian Nada Shabout has argued that much of art history has been "disengaged from the historical development of the art it describes" because it relies on applying Western theories and limited knowledge to works from other regions. This reliance not only distorts meaning but also sidelines the intellectual and aesthetic traditions that artists themselves draw upon.
The effect is twofold. First, it marginalizes narratives: by treating Western art as the default or “universal” standard, art from the rest of the world is cast as peripheral. Arab artists, like many from the Global South, often appear in the canon as footnotes or as evidence of influence, rather than as participants in shaping global modernity. Shabout notes that this creates the sense of being “incessantly stuck in a cycle of rejection,” where artists are forced to either imitate Western movements or be framed as outsiders to them.
Second, these inherited categories create a persistent “otherness.” Instead of being recognized as self-contained practices with their own trajectories, Arab art is too often defined through what it is not Western, modern, or canonical. Exhibitions in Europe and North America have historically promoted themes of “building bridges” or “cultural exchange,” but in doing so they frequently cast Arab art as an attempt to catch up, rather than as an entity with its own momentum and terms. This framing reinforces imperial power structures: Arab creativity becomes legible only when measured against Western benchmarks.
Language matters. What we call art informs how it is collected, studied, and displayed. A painting described as “Islamic” is more likely to end up in a decorative arts wing than in a contemporary gallery. An artist introduced as “Middle Eastern” may be read as a regional spokesperson, rather than as an individual voice in conversation with global peers.
Institutions and Narratives
These classifications did not emerge by accident. Western museums and universities have long shaped the canon. From the establishment of Islamic art departments in the late 19th century to the Orientalist salons of Paris and London, Arab creativity was often seen as derivative, decorative, or traditional rarely innovative in its own right.
Even when Arab artists entered the “modern” frame, it was often through Western mediation. Think of how Mathaf in Doha, or the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, have had to work deliberately to build counter-archives that highlight Arab modernism on its own terms. Without these interventions, artists like Saloua Raouda Choucair or Dia Azzawi risked being remembered as regional curiosities rather than central figures in global modernism.
Decolonial Shifts
Today, decolonial thought offers tools to disrupt these inherited hierarchies. As Palestinian-American curator Salwa Mikdadi has emphasized, the challenge is not only to correct omissions but to recognize Arab artists as active participants in shaping global art histories- see Forces of Change, her essays on Arab modernism. Scholars and curators are increasingly attentive to how power operates in the archive: whose voices are preserved, whose categories dominate, and whose knowledge is sidelined.
Exhibitions across the region, from the Casablanca Art School retrospectives to the growing number of artist-led spaces in Riyadh, Cairo, Dubai, Amman, and Beirut, challenge the idea that Arab art must be filtered through Western validation to matter. As Mikdadi notes, this work is not simply about “rejecting the West.” It is about shifting the frame: centering regional perspectives, treating artists as theorists of their own practice, and recognizing that influence flows in multiple directions.
When Etel Adnan’s landscapes are shown in Paris, or when Ahmed Mater’s work is collected by the British Museum, these are not one-way acts of cultural absorption. They are exchanges shaped by Arab agency as much as by global circulation—evidence that Arab art is not derivative, but generative.
Voices from Within
Artists and curators across the Arab world are actively rewriting the script. The Lebanese artist Huguette Caland resisted being pigeonholed as either “Oriental” or “feminist,” instead insisting on the universality and playfulness of her forms. Similarly, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum has long unsettled the Orientalist gaze, creating work that insists on Arab experience as central to global conversations on power and identity. In Morocco, the legacy of the Casablanca Art School and figures like Farid Belkahia show how modernism was reimagined through local craft and Amazigh traditions.
On the curatorial front, Hoor Al Qasimi and Reem Fadda have argued for approaches that refuse to treat Arab art as peripheral, while institutions like Barjeel have assembled archives that foreground Arab modernism on its own terms.
Global as Exchange
Too often, global art history has been narrated as a story of Western influence radiating outward. But influence has always been reciprocal. Arab artists in the 20th century drew on European modernism, yes, but they also reshaped it. Iraqi painter Shakir Hassan Al Said fused Sufi metaphysics with abstraction; Algerian modernists like M’hamed Issiakhem wove Amazigh symbolism and post-independence identity into their practice, transforming personal and collective trauma into a distinctly Algerian form of modernism.
To acknowledge this two-way exchange is not to deny colonial asymmetries, but to recognize that Arab art has never been passive. It has absorbed, reimagined, and contributed to global modernities in ways that remain under-acknowledged.
Why Language Still Matters
If the past century shows anything, it is that the words we use to describe art carry weight. They shape markets, academic canons, and public understanding. To call something “Islamic” or “Middle Eastern” is not inherently wrong, but without critical awareness, these terms risk reinforcing old hierarchies.
What is at stake is more than semantics. It is about who gets to define value, who gets to speak, and how Arab creativity is positioned in the world. For A-Room, part of our mission is to amplify voices that refuse to be boxed in by inherited categories. Our blog is not simply a mirror of global discourse, but a space for Arab artists and thinkers to articulate their own frameworks: fluid, rooted, and unapologetically self-defined.
Toward New Narratives
The challenge ahead is not to replace one label with another, but to remain attentive to the ways art resists easy classification. Arab art is not a static category; it is a dynamic field of practices shaped by histories, migrations, and imaginations that stretch far beyond colonial maps.
By listening to artists and curators from within the region, by embracing language that reflects lived realities rather than imposed taxonomies, and by insisting on global art as dialogue rather than dominance, we begin to see Arab art for what it is: complex, evolving, and inseparable from the world at large.
This is the work of reframing; not as an academic exercise, but as an act of cultural work.