Uncovering the Lost History of the American Art World’s Engagements with the Middle East, 1957–1979

FAIN: FEL-281714-22

Sarah-Neel Smith
MICA (Baltimore, MD 21217-4191)

Research and writing leading to a book about the ways in which museum curators, art critics, and artists shaped public perception of the Middle East from the early Cold War years through the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis.

My book reconstructs the lost history of America’s artistic engagements with the Middle East between the 1950s–70s. Before WWII, the US concerned itself very little with the region, but in the 1950s it became the dominant Western power there. Though the political-military engagements of this period are widely recognized as foundational to US-Middle East relations today, we still lack a basic understanding of how the visual arts operated at this pivotal moment in US history. I use Visual Studies methods to analyze the dozens of exhibits, artworks, and texts through which the Americans engaged the Islamic Middle East at this juncture. They produced artworks, exhibitions, and articles––all in an effort to combat the negative stereotypes of pop culture and assert the importance of Islamic culture. The book contributes to humanities-wide efforts to map the ways distinct registers of culture (high and low, visual, literary, popular) construct and contest Orientalist dynamics of power.